ANCESTRAL NUMBERS II / Sweet Tooth. The Return. Ruby. Enos. Deployment. Arrival. Grayscale. Ancestral Numbers (Robinson) / Jason Robinson, t-sax/s-sax/a-fl; Michael Dessen, tb; Joshua White, pno; Drew Gress, bs; Ches Smith, dm/glock / Playscape Recordings PSR 082423
Six months after jazz saxist-composer Jason Robinson released Ancestral Numbers I, we have its sequel, and as in the case of the first release, the music is fascinating…as are the visual graphics by Marcelo Radulovich. And now, at last, I understand why Vol. 1 listed the title track as an alternate take. Here, we finally get the original take as the album’s closer.
As in the case of the first volume, Robinson’s composing style employs loose, somewhat funky jazz beats which he combines with melodic lines which appear to be strings of short motifs, yet somehow they emerge as coherent musical statements in their own right. Although there are references in his work to Carla Bley and Charles Mingus, Robinson’s music has a flavor all its own.
If anything, Robinson’s music is harder-driving than Bley’s, particularly the opening number here, Sweet Tooth, with his funky and somewhat loose beat in which the steady pulse of bassist Drew Gress plays against the looser pulse of drummer Ches Smith. And there’s nothing particularly subtle about Joshua White’s piano: this is straightahead hard bop playing in the old Blue Note mold while leader Robinson’s tenor seems to combine elements of Rollins, Coltrane and Shepp. When trombonist Michael Dessen enters, he is playing wild triple-tongue figures, almost sound like an angry elephant on the warpath.
Yet as on the first album, Robinson shows us that he has more than one composing style. The Return opens with an extended out-of-tempo drum solo, interspersed with Smith on the glockenspiel. When the theme finally appears, it is one of those quirky unmelodic things that modern jazz composers seem addicted to. (Really, folks…just because a theme is edgy and unmelodic doesn’t make it innovative. It’s just edgy and unmelodic.) But the solos are excellent, particularly Dessen’s. Moreover, Robinson’s concept of jazz composition is not really like most other jazz composers, who tend to set up a theme and then use the improvisations as a form of development. On the contrary, Robinson almost seems to work in the opposite direction, possibly by conceptualizing his improvisations and then working backwards to create a theme based on them. Oddly enough, this makes his music much more musically unified than many other jazz composers nowadays. You can hear this in a piece like Enos, which sounds as if it is all over the place yet somehow pulls itself together yet builds to a moment of frenzy in the piano solo before the odd ensemble figures take over again, and especially in Deployment where the wildness of Robinson’s tenor sax solo manages to not sound out of place because he begins and ends it in context to the surrounding music. This aesthetic would also explain a piece like Arrival, which moves fast, chaotic figures about in the first few bars like scurrying mice before it settles down into an alto flute statement but is then followed by rhythmic and melodic deconstruction.
Robinson’s Ancestral Numbers II is, quite simply, an exotic and complex ride through a number of jazz styles which are combined in unusual ways and filtered through the minds of the participating musicians. Sometimes verbal description can only go so far in letting the reader know what to expect, and this is one of those times. This is a listening experience and one that you will find rewarding even in those moments when your mind says, “Wait a minute…!”
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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