Pianist Lex Korten has been a reliable sideperson for lots of up and coming jazz notables in the past several years – for example, check out his work on vibraphonist Simon Moullier’s excellent 2024 album Elements of Light. For Canopy, his first album as a leader, Korten seeks to break away from recognizable jazz noise to find music that works for improvisers without sounding predictable. Joined by saxophonist David Leon, singer Claire Dickson, guitarist Tal Yahalom, and drummer Stephen Boegehold, Korten folds in elements of plenty of other musics while still keeping to the spirit of jazz improvisation. Yahalom and Leon hold back as much as step forward, playing lines that provide texture as often as melody, laying down solos only when the song requires it. Boegehold plays around the beat more often than on it, keeping the foundation shifting on its axis to avoid rhythms that sound too familiar. Often eschewing lyrics, Dickson swirls through the air, finding the empty spaces in the arrangements and injecting ethereal melodies. Watching over it all is the music’s composer, letting his players express themselves within his skeletal frameworks, tying their efforts together with his enigmatic piano wanderings. It’s exploratory jazz, chamber jazz, ambient jazz, at times even alternative rock – but it’s never simple regurgitations of any kind of musical orthodoxy. (Note that the final song is a Thomas Dolby cover.) Like recent records by Mary Halvorson, Donny McCaslin, Nels Cline, and Patricia Brennan, Canopy moves away from the idea of jazz as a formal genre, pushing towards making music with no easy label – and that’s a good thing.
