There are those that hear jazz as a tradition, a style of music that requires certain elements (blues, swing, distinctive harmonies, improvisation) in order to qualify for the name. Then there are those who’ve absorbed not only those elements, but added a dozen others that interest them, creating their own genre that may not need to be called “jazz” at all.
Drummer/percussionist/composer Ches Smith may well be the king of this approach right now. With one hell of an impressive CV (Tim Berne, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, Xiu Xiu, Darius Jones, Dave Holland, James Brandon Lewis, Secret Chiefs 3, and a good half dozen of his own projects), Smith has proven his versatility, creativity, and sheer musicality. For Clone Row (a play on Arnold Schoenberg’s tone row), Smith rounds up a gang of similarly adventurous players: guitarists Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman and bassist Nick Dunston. The two rhythmeers augment their instrumentation with vibraphone, electronics, and drum machines, creating a foundation that constantly bubbles, like asphalt in triple degree heat. The two axe-people, meanwhile, simply go about their usual business, with Halvorson’s harmonic weirdness melding with Ellman’s skewed traditionalism in a rewrite of jazz guitar vocabulary. This combo of envelope-shredders could have simply conjured chaos – instead, held together by Smith’s compositional vision, the quartet layers paint like the demon seed of Jackson Pollock and Salvador Dali. As with so many of Smith’s thangs, there’s not a lot else that sounds like this.
Virtual trio Three-Layer Cake goes even further outside the bounds of this thing we call jazz. Each member of the trio – bassist/vocalist Mike Watt, guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook, drummer Mike Pride – lays down his part in his own home studio. Pride kicks things off with a drum track, then Watt adds his bass part, followed by Seabrook contributing his bits. While based on improvisation, as was their debut LP Stove Top, Sounds the Color of Grounds finds the threesome making a bigger effort towards songcraft, rather than pure spontaneity. Of course, with these guys in charge, those songs don’t sound anything like pop music or singer/songwriter seriousness. Instead, each track blends Pride’s rock-solid grooves, Watt’s off-kilter bass rhythms, and Seabrook’s alternatingly shredding and singing melodies into a gestalt akin to a roadrunner looking sideways at a lizard before hopping in for the kill. Watt also supplies some of his patented spiels, presented in (alleged) sonnet form, contemplating the past, the future, and, as usual, his friends. (The ghost of D Boon is never far away.) Never straightforward, frequently bizarre, but always – somehow – accessible, Sounds the Color of Grounds lets its players indulge in their every whim without descending into anarchy.
