Howard Alden / Andy Brown Quartet, Heavy Artillery

There are quite a few guitar-slingers playing jazz out there these days, if the number of recordings I get every month is any indication. Many look back to a very golden tradition of the '50s and '60s especially, when there seemed to be so many great players recording and playing the clubs. That Jim Hall has passed means there are even fewer legends from that time still active, and I was very sad to hear about it.

But even so we have some great plectrists still, folks who can keep the excitement and immediacy going in "classic" ways. Howard Alden and Andy Brown are two of them. They join forces in a quartet where the picking is other-worldly and the swinging hard.The Howard Alden / Andy Brown Quartet's new album Heavy Artillery (Delmark 5008) is aptly named. They are fired up with an able rhythm section of Joe Policastro on bass and Bob Rummage on drums, and it's lines, lines, lines of fire that in this case you DO want to get in the way of.

They tackle standards of the songbook and jazz variety but the main idea is to jam out, interchanging, exchanging and extemporizing musical chariots of fire to keep you moving along with them.

It's one of those sessions where the pump is primed and the ice has melted. With a winter like this one, that's exactly what we need!

Bryan and the Haggards, Merles Just Want to Have Fun, with Eugene Chadbourne

The new one by Bryan and the Haggards is a 100% hoot. Merles Just Want to Have Fun (Northern Spy 046) joins the "band" with Eugene Chadbourne on vocals and acoustic strings. If they were totally off the wall before, well, the wall just got even further away.

If you don't know it's a prime young group of cutting-edge jazzmen taking the music of good ole boy Merle Haggard and playing havoc with it. Bryan Murray takes on some of the vocals and plays various instruments, most notably his tenor; Jon Irabagon plays soprano, tenor, c-melody and bass clarinet; Jon Lundbom is on the electric guitar but also some banjo, Moppa Elliot takes the bass, and Danny Fischer plays the drums.

Underneath it all they truly have learned the songs, but then they work through some primo wacky trips that are both very out and supremely funny. The saxes and guitar work alone is totally bonkers. Yakety-insane! As I play this one I can't help but laughing. It's like Spike Jones meets Albert Ayler.

If you are not a redneck (or maybe even if you are) this is gonna tickle your being. In these hard times it's maybe even funnier because the promise of the pickup truck and boots philosophy seems farther away than ever from everyday reality, even if there are still plenty of turd kickers out there. But hey, this is so crazy that even those cats may see the humor?

You want to laugh? This one does it!

Rich Rosenthal, Falling Up

Rich Rosenthal's album Falling Up (MSK 301) has real bite to it but also enough bark to warn you to pay attention. It's in a free-ish jazz zone without necessarily getting completely into the fire music aspect. The electricity and energy of Rosenthal's guitar has enough jolt that there is a near-rock edge, the compositions are well thought-out, the solos are hip and the rhythm section cooks with an easy sort of lope or undaunted determination, depending.

All compositions are by Rich save for Steve Lacy's "No Baby" and Jimmy Lyons' "Wee Sneezawee" (both good choices, underperformed in the repertoire). Rich is joined by the "talent-deserving-wider-recognition" Joe Giardullo on soprano. Then there's Craig Nixon on upright bass and Matt Crane at the drums.

Rich solos with an outside edge, sometimes with a kind of deliberation that works well and is a little rare in this kind of guitar style; at other points he swings for the musical fences and connects. He picks some hip chord voicings and can wind a phrase in ways that take it to the edge and keep your attention. Joe is someone to hear too, as always, and sounds well.

It's a disk that goes from station-to-station without flagging. It's a very nice guitar effort and it's equally cool on the group togetherness end.

Listen in, listen on...

Bob DeVos, Shadow Box

Bob DeVos gets everything in gear for his fifth album as a leader. He put together some grooving originals and a couple by others you don't hear covered much (Wes's "Twisted Blues", Mel Torme's "Born to Be Blue") then gathered some hiply swinging cats and let the "tapes" roll.

Shadow Box (American Showplace 5922) is all that. Bob finds the right mix of heat and feel with Dan Kostelnik on the B-3 organ, Steve Johns on drums, and, for half the program, Ralph Bowen on tenor sax.

It's straight ahead hard bop today with the groove and the changes in mind. Bob solos excellently, fluidly, and very coherently with some fine strings of note-ing and groovy chords. Kostelnik counters him with some very classic bopping organ and lines that are not cribbed from Jimmy Smith records. Bowen swings and blows well. And Johns is the right drummer.

DeVos is a hell of a nice guitarist. Just listen to this and you'll hear it.

Mark Lettieri, Futurefun

Mark Lettieri? Good guitarist. Electric. Plays a prog sort of jazz-rock on his new album Futurefun (self-released). He's got some nice rythmic sensibilities and can come out with rapid-fire lines that end in a bluesy-rock territory but can get there in various ways, and he doesn't quite sound like anybody else.

It's a trio-quartet setting and a platform for Lettieri's good sense and interesting written launching pads. It's beyond cliche and it shows you what he's got, which is some chops but a musical mind that works in ways that make the music worth hearing. It's not technically astute fireworks in the end. It's music.

Here's a cat that's got something really nice going!

Adam Lane Trio, Absolute Horizon

Adam Lane has in the last several decades thrived as one of the very brightest stars on acoustic bass, a jazz composer-arranger of unique personality and poise, and a band leader of the highest rank.

A new CD of him in a bare-bones trio setting doing completely improvised music, Absolute Horizon (No Business NBCD 61), gives us a slightly different, but none the less welcome perspective. Here we have three excellent players--Adam, Darius Jones on alto sax and Vijay Anderson on drums--putting aside arranged compositions and going straight at it.

And what you might expect is what you get--a totally free-wheeling ride through the fertile, musically inventive collective imaginations of a trio of master avant jazzmen.

It all clicks. There are seven contrasting pieces with a generous playing time so you can imbibe a good long set of it all.

There is of course lots of Adam Lane's bass playing to dig here, arco or pizz, ensemble and solo. But then Darius and Vijay are primed and there are fully "actionable" sequences to get you off your mental seat and charge straight on through the music. ("Actionable" comes out of me almost involuntarily. It's a word I keep coming across in the many job descriptions I go through online every day in search of a JOB, you'll understand? It means that it invites or impells you to do something, in this case listen and dig.)

Some of this is flat-out, killer energy freedom, some of it is in a finessed, interactively subtle mood, some of it swings like hell, in time. It all swings in a wide sense, in or out of time. It shows you how some of the best can just let go and get a radically varied program of exciting new improvisations that showcase each as individuals yet get all kinds of group sounds and dynamics going. In fact this is something an avant jazz novice should hear if he or she needs to understand the importance of collective invention, of listening and proceeding in a totally free small group setting.

I have a couple more Adam Lane disks coming, so stay tuned. Meanwhile get a hold of this one!

George Cotsirilos Trio, Variations

In the zone of mainstream, there are a fair number of guitar voices out there. I get quite a few to audition and I am glad for that. But I cannot cover all of them, of course. Today's guitarist belongs here because his chordal sense is very fine. He also writes some good vehicles for his trio. This is the George Cotsirilos Trio's third release, Variations (OA2 22104).

It features George and the bass-drum team of Robb Fisher and Ron Marabuto, good players for this intimate session, which keeps the swinging going throughout.

The Cotsirilos single-line solo way is not entirely the notes you might expect. He seems more confident in the chordal solo mode but either way he is up to something good, not something simply reworked from the classic past. So listen and hear another way to do it all.