The first thing you hear on Salvatore Tranchini’s Faces, for some reason, is a sample of a man saying “Thank you.” Once that’s out of the way, the band gets down to business with a pellmell update on “Impressions” called “Eurostar”. If you’re looking for strong, orthodox postbop, then Italy’s always a reliable source – they do it as well as anyone in the States (even, dare I say it, a little better?) – and Faces certainly fits the bill: nothing new here, but the cookers cook, the ballads sing, the studio sound is nice, and while none of the originals is exactly memorable they’re nice too. The playing avoids the generic quality of a lot of music in this category: trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso has bite and buzz, and there’s a welcome rasp to Daniele Scannapieco’s tenor sax (downright hoarse on “Sad Day,” like he’d just been listening to a stack of Eddie Lockjaw Davis discs). Pianist Francesco Nastro plays with a lot of zip, and at the end of the disc gets to show his touch with a ballad on a piano-trio reading of “I Remember Clifford.” Tranchini motors things along without indulging himself with drum features: only on “Nettuno” is there a slight tendency to overdo things. Best tracks: Nastro’s hectic blues line “Triton” and the cover of Steve Swallow’s “Running.”

Jesse Chandler’s debut disc Somewhere:Between moves with quicksilver grace, pulling together everything from old-school fusion (there’s even a cheeky lift from In a Silent Way) to current mergers between small-group jazz and pop music. Saxophonists Kris Bauman and John Ellis turn up together or separately on several tracks, often in colourists’ roles - Bauman, for instance, contributes weirdly FXed alto sax to “Insomniatown,” and Ellis (a mainstay of Charlie Hunter’s band) even plays a little ocarina on “Walnut Tree.” But the real center of attention is the core trio. Chandler’s organ purrs and his electric piano shimmers; the broth is sometimes further thickened with the addition of pianist Albert Sanz. Mike Moreno contributes cool, silken guitar, while Bill Campbell kicks up a small dust-storm at the drumkit. Some of the tracks are drifting pastel-fusion recalling the more pacific moments of the Abercrombie/Wall/Nussbaum trio, but the most memorable things come when the band is scavenging pop music for ideas, as on “Walnut Tree” or the tremendous “Insomniatown” (where Campbell’s drumming is so frenetic it’s hard to believe it’s not a machine). An attractive, very playable fusion disc that insinuates rather than hits you over the head – what’s not to like?

Bassist Alexis Cuadrado was born in Barcelona and is now part of the New York jazz scene; he has a likeable, vibrant approach to his instrument, and writes a good tune to boot. On Visual his arrangements take full advantage of the three-horn front-line (Bauman and Ellis again, plus trombonist Alan Ferber) and guitarist Steve Cárdenas. It’s the big sound of the ensemble and the richly colored writing that make an impression on the first couple of tracks; the solos are well-turned but hardly striking, especially with Ellis confined to piping soprano rather than his meatier tenor and bass clarinet. “El Perro,” a yearning Frisellian serenade, is much more like it, and the churning blues “El Gran Profeta” is downright hot, with a spirited brawl among the horns and a roughhouse guitar solo. Cuadrado’s interest in unusual musical textures leads him to a couple intriguing experiments with studio overdubbing. “Mario’s Pencil” is a mysterious free-form collage constructed by overdubbing the entire band over the original take of the tune. Even more striking is Cuadrado’s feat of overdubbing on the Víctor Jara song “Te Recuerdo Amanda,” a gorgeous, heartfelt arrangement for five basses (two pizzicato, three bowed). Visual is consistently good music by a smart, lateral-thinking musician, and just occasionally – as on the Jara song – something really special.

Like a lot of musicians nowadays, Geoff Goodman, an American guitarist based in Europe since the 1980s, likes to keep several pots on the boil. His projects include the world-music ensembles Misery Loves Company and Tabla and Strings, the rocked-up Tengelman Girls, the improv ensemble Le Petit Chien, a longstanding partnership with saxophonist Chris Hirson, a “Rumba orchestra” cum “drunken Mexican wedding band” called Musical Matador, and a tribute to Benny Goodman called – you guessed it – Goodman Plays Goodman. By comparison the plain old moniker on Naked Eye – “The Geoff Goodman Quintet” – looks like the most straitlaced of his guises, but there’s still plenty of personality on show. This is jazz with a sprightly, thoroughly contemporary sensibility: post-bop, post-Monk, post-Ornette, post-Dolphy, post-Frisell, post-everything. “Strip Poker” is “Bemsha Swing” with its wires crossed, the launching-pad for some wonderfully dishevelled, gangling bass clarinet from Rudi Mahall. “Who Is Heinz?” is giddy and Ornettish: Mahall is all mock-innocence, while Felix Wahnschaffe contributes some appropriately lemon-sharp alto. Other tracks are harder to sum up. “Naked Eye,” for instance, sounds like the fading dream of a bittersweet Hawaiian love-affair; “John Lennon’s Assassination” is a tender threnody prompted by a drawing of the murder by Goodman’s kindergarten-age daughter Corinna; “I’m a Woman Locked Inside a Man’s Body” is as yearning and estranged as its title. There is a lone track from the Goodman Plays Goodman project, a mischievous reading of “Topsy” for just horns and guitar which does for the Swing Era what News for Lulu did for hard bop. Of the five discs under review this is the one that’s received most airplay in this household: it’s a pleasure from start to finish.

Philadelphia pianist Tom Lawton has been piling up the pieces on Retrospective/Debut for a while – the earliest composition here dates from 1975 - as well as honing a formidably two-handed approach to the piano that slips easily between mainstream and more outside styles. Recorded over three days at Maggie’s Farm (the home of Palmetto Records), this double-CD set is almost too much music to handle, packed full of ambitious, unconventional charts and committed playing. Even when the music is in a mainstream jazz idiom, Lawton’s interest in the long form ensures it’s never business-as-usual: these are some of the most elaborate heads on record since Mingus wrote “Sue’s Changes.” These structures demand a lot of the musicians, and of the listener too: the performances are generally lengthy, and with the more labyrinthine pieces (“Islands,” for instance) it’s hard not to have intermittent “where are we going now?” doubts, though repeated listening helps make things clearer. Lawton has assembled an excellent band to perform his music (of whom only trumpeter John Swana is especially well-known): they handle its fearsome complexities with impressive ease. Swana’s big moments mostly come on the first disc, notably the trumpet/piano duet “Grey Matter Doesn’t”; on the second disc saxophonist Ben Schachter gets more of the spotlight, and there are also two tracks for just piano and rhythm. But it’s Lawton himself who consistently grabs the attention across both discs, even when he’s just comping. Often he sounds merely like an admirable but conventional lyrical pianist in a Evans/Hancock vein, or a proficient hard bopper, but even on these occasions he smuggles in more adventurous stuff: listen, for instance, to his borrowings from Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor on “Waxing Schachterian.” But my favorite pieces here are those where he’s at his most mercurial, inside and outside all at once: above all, the two solo pieces, a whirlwind reading of “Donna Lee” and an extraordinary ten-minute meditation on Wayne Shorter’s “JuJu” - the pair as different yet complementary as lightning-bolt and thunder. (An all-solo disc by Lawton would be a real treat.) Three pieces include sections of free improvising, which offer some of the most dramatic and surprising music on the album. The piano/drums duet “Celestial Prism” is delicacy itself; the other two pieces – “The Norman D Invasion” (with guest clarinettist Norman David) and “Archetypal Archives” – are quintet performances that gradually let go of written material and take off into anything-can-happen open space. Lawton speaks in the liner notes of “spontaneous orchestration,” and he likes to set the music spinning off in a new direction with his every gesture – this is perhaps his most significant debt to Taylor. Despite its polished surface and its general adherence to mainstream jazz idioms, Retrospective/Debut is as exploratory as any of the other discs under review. In some ways it’s the most demanding of these albums, requiring a listener who’s willing to work with it a bit; it also richly repays the effort.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, November 2004