Pianist Greg Burk was born in Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan and the New England Conservatory; he was part of the Boston scene from 1996 until his recent relocation to Italy. Carpe Momentum is his third album as a leader, although he’s also made prominent appearances on record as a sideman with Either/Orchestra (Afro-Cubism and Neo-Modernism). “Burk’s Quirks,” the album’s opener, is an ear-bending bitonal line recalling George Russell’s reading of “Sippin’ at Bells” on the Five Spot disc (Russell was one of Burk’s mentors). Burk’s solo has the insouciance and brusqueness of a Paul Bley bebop reading, but it’s Bley cut to pieces: stylishly disarrayed bouquets of atomized, stuttered phrases, delivered with a needling attack and an infuriatingly deliberate rubato. Jerry Bergonzi’s entry streamlines the music – he rides the beat more conventionally and his lines actually have beginnings and middles and ends – but weirdness sets in again with Jonathan Robinson and Gerald Cleaver’s jittery bass/drums interlude just before the pokerfaced head returns.

The rest of the album is similarly fascinating and perverse. “Serena al Telefono” and “Hymn for Her” are tributes to Burk’s Italian wife: the former, like Moran’s The Bandwagon and Mahanthappa’s Mother Tongue, finds musical inspiration in speech cadences, and even mimics the sound of touch-tone dialing; the latter is a handsome ballad halfway between Ellington/Strayhorn and Duke Pearson’s “You Know I Care,” given a soulful reading by Bergonzi despite the more restless, finicky approach of the other musicians. “Ink” is mostly freely improvised, and comes off almost as a holiday from the churning rhythmic intensity of the rest of the album. “ Look to the Astroid” has a 7/4 moebius-strip groove, stated at two different speeds; Burk’s unaccompanied solo is almost mechanical in feel, while Bergonzi’s doubletime feature has a dancing Chick Corea vibe. “For George Russell” is nearly a conventional swinger, where Burk takes a more fluid, long-lined solo than usual; while “Hupid Stumid” is a striking exercise in mounting hysteria. “Song for Sara,” the closer, is an elegy for a friend killed by a car when out bicycling; typically for Burk, it’s not a sombre farewell but a disquietingly intense waltz taken at a rapid clip. Carpe Momentum is music under high pressure, “experimental” in a way that few jazz albums are (even avantgarde ones): the results are willful and relentlessly on-the-boil, but that’s a small price to pay for music this inquiring and uncomplacent.

In his liner notes to Monsoon, David Liebman remarks on guitarist Scott DuBois’ confident use of odd meters, claiming that “it is rhythm in particular which has become the focal point of the new generation of artists coming up in the 1990s.” Liebman’s certainly onto something, but in DuBois’ case the odd meters, borrowings from Indian musics, beatific composition titles and predilection for acoustic rather than electric guitar point just as much backwards to 1970s figures like Ralph Towner and John McLaughlin. The album’s centerpiece is the three-part “Acceptance Suite,” whose sections are stitched together (à la Coltrane) by Thomas Morgan’s spotlit bass solos. It’s quiet, almost tactful free jazz that tend to recede and draw near and again recede; DuBois himself is virtually absent until the tasty guitar-drums improv near the piece’s end. The suite could have been drawn out further – its three movements are packed into twelve minutes – but it’s nonetheless an attractive, thoughtful piece of music. The rest of the album is quite different in texture, riding brisk, carefully worked-out odd-meter grooves; Liebman sits in on four tracks, his gnarled playing a striking contrast to the smoother work of saxophonists Loren Stillman and Jason Rigby. DuBois is a nimble, rapidfire guitarist, but he’s also a patient player, given to long silences: he waits like a hungry robin, head cocked, searching for the right moment to strike. Performances tend to keep within a given tune’s parameters: on “Lost Silence” and “Monsoon,” for instance, the accompanists hew closely to the piece’s rhythmic cycles while the soloist does his thing on top; as a result I miss the feeling of openended exploration/excavation that makes the Burk album memorable. But that’s my only real reservation about Monsoon, an enjoyable, highly playable disc which amounts to a promising debut for DuBois.

Gebhard Ullmann’s previous large-group ventures have involved Tá Lam, his idiosyncratic ensemble pitting a lone accordionist against a gang of horn players. For The Big Band Project he joins forces with the more conventional NDR Big Band for a live concert in Hamburg; there’s also a stray track from a studio session a few days earlier. There’s no new material, just eight standbys from Ullmann’s book, but the arrangements (by Satoko Fujii, Chris Dahlgren, Andy Emler and Guenter Lenz) are striking reimaginings of the source material; Fujii’s creepy arrangement of “Think Tank,” with mournful flutes and slow-mo orchestral implosions, is especially ear-grabbing. Ullmann’s tunes are often pitched on the edge of satire or absurdity (the bombastic rock beat and muttering trombone riff on “Tá Lam,” the strutting tango in “D. Nee No”), but mood is generally sternly mordant instead of humorous. The sore thumb here is the Kenny Wheelerish “Fourteen Days / Café Toronto”: like Wheeler’s music, it’s the sonic equivalent of an aquarium, its gently undulating activity slower and prettier and more weightless than the world outside the tank, though Ullmann’s tenor and Claus Stötter’s flugelhorn dart around in the foreground like excited fish. The leader divides his time on the album between tenor and soprano saxophones (quite pungent) and bass clarinet (cheerier and more whimsical); there are also fine cameos by several other members of the band, notably pianist Vladyslav Sendecki’s sparkling solo on “Tá Lam.” Like Burk and DuBois’ discs, The Big Band Project is brisk, flavorful and stylistically polyglot, and it comes strongly recommended for listeners who like their big band music perched comfortably on the dividing line between mainstream and avant-garde.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, March 2005