Thumbscrew - Wingbeats (Cuneiform)

Wingbeats, the eighth album from jazz trio Thumbscrew, is one of those records about which it’s difficult to write. Not because it’s not good, but for the exact opposite reason: it’s excellent – just as the band’s prior records have been. Guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer/vibraphonist Tomas Fujiwara have a truly special chemistry honed over years of working together both inside and outside this project, and it shows every time they hit the studio together.

As usual, each member contributes tunes, from the groovy (Formanek’s “How May I Inconvenience You Today,” Fujiwara’s “Knots”) to the sublime (Halvorson’s “Singlet,” Fujiwara’s “Irreverent Grace”), from the tight (Halvorson’s “Greenish Tents” and “Pyrrhic”) to the loose (Fujiwara’s title track, Formanek’s on-the-nose “Wayward”). Plus the trio gives us an exciting take on Charles Mingus’s funky, free-flowing “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.” Each musician boasts a distinctive style: Formanek keeps the rhythm in the pocket while still wandering around the beat, Fujiwara similarly keeps the pulse steady despite playing like a free jazz master, and Halvorson carries the melodies while keeping them off balance due to her harmonic identity and her ever-present DL4 Delay Modeler pedal. On each tune the band illustrates their telepathic, near-uncanny interplay, sounding like three offshoots of one brain more than any other group of players working, in or out of jazz.

And that’s the problem – not with the album, obviously, but with covering it. Wingbeats is a damn fine album in a series of damn fine albums, making it difficult to find something new to say. The urge is to simply shout, “Brilliant!”