Garrison Fewell, Invisible Resonance Trio, with Roy Campbell, Luther Gray

Life as you go through it gives you at times a kind of shock, as the cycles of birth and death realize themselves directly to you. I have lost some dear friends and we all have lost some important musical voices in the last year or so. Today's music commemorates the life and music of two of them, Roy Campbell and Garrison Fewell. I did not know Roy but have appreciated for a long time his musical gifts and have experienced the true anguish of his passing in the New York jazz community. Garrison I similarly have embraced as a musical force of importance, and got to know his kindly, saintly self in his last year or so on this earth.

Now they are both gone. But the music lives on in the form of recordings, happily. Garrison Fewell's Invisible Resonance Trio (Creative Nation Music 027) is something Garrison was working to get out in the last months of his illness. We are surely the better for it, though it was with a bitter-sweet sadness that I received this CD in the mail. It is a late 2013 recording of Garrison on electric guitar, Roy on trumpet and flute, and Luther Gray (who remains with us, thankfully) on drums and percussion.

It captured an inspired moment of the three together in excellent form. Free and freewheeling is the set. Free jazz it is if we must attach a name to it. It was the last time the three played together, happily in a studio setting.

There is great creativity and an electricity in the air to be heard palpably on all of this. So much so that I almost feel a certain reluctance to try and put my impressions of it into words. To make words take the place of the music is no doubt something of a violation when the music dwells on such a high plane as this music does. Yet my job as I see it is to describe as best I can with the aim of generating interest and appreciation.

So I will say that each plays a distinct role in the music that results. They listen and proceed, complementing the statements of each without stepping on what each the other is doing. Their high level of interaction is such that each leaves a space for the others so that a fully three-way synchronicity blossoms forth. And that result has, as Garrison would surely affirm, a kind of spiritual dimension, a striving outward from self to create another three-way musical being that is the trio here.

Garrison plays his own kind of guitar on these improvisations, neither predictable nor inevitable. Roy on trumpet and flute does the same in his own special way. And Luther contributes an ideal percussive being that builds a sonic arch to the others, acting not always as a "drummer" in the obvious sense as much as a third, melodic-textural voice.

The results are moving, a testament to deep listening and deep responding, a kind of memorial for those who have left us and a rejoiner for us all, to keep going, to keep on the path as they surely did when they lived.

A sad goodbye to Roy and Garrison, but a reaffirming hello to Luther and to us all. This is music that will ever speak. Hear the voices. Heed the wordless message!

Adam Lane's Blue Spirit Band

Adam Lane isn't only a superb bassist. That should be enough. But he is also a leader of real strength. You get that today with his album Adam Lane's Blue Spirit Band (Cadence Jazz 1231) which was waxed in 2009 but released last year. The mood is elated, exuberent, and the repertoire is the roots, blues, spirituals, folk songs. That doesn't mean he's "gone traditional" any more than the Art Ensemble did on Message to Our Folks. It means that respect for the past combines with what playing cutting-edge jazz is to these artists.

When I first listened to this one and then put it in sequence for later listens and review, Roy Campbell was still with us and we had no idea, no warning that he was going to leave us. But he did, suddenly, shockingly, gone. But here he is on this record, blazing fire, sounding excellent, a trumpet at the top of today, now a memory. So RIP Roy Campbell. This is as good a place as any to hear his last flowering.

And then the rest of the band is at the top, too. Avram Fefer on tenor, volcanic and impassioned. Vijay Anderson turns in a very together performance on the drums, as you can count on. Adam plays bass like you know he can. And the arrangements turn these old hoary classics into the now of today.

"House of the Rising Sun"? Yeah, and "Peace Like A River", "Old Time Religion" and a bunch of others, done with all the heat and tensile strength of the music today. There's another release on CIMP I'll be covering shortly. But get this one; pay respects to Roy Campbell but do the same for all of these artists. Someday we'll all be gone and we need to appreciate the art while we--and they--are here. You'll be getting one hell of a nice recording too!

Fay Victor and Other Dimensions in Music, "Kaiso Stories"

First things first. Kaiso was the precursor to modern Calypso. It came about when African-derived musical-narrative traditions were transposed and transformed on Spanish colonial soil. There was a political component often contained in the song narratives.

With this tradition in mind singer-narrator Fay Victor along with the collective improvisational ensemble "Other Dimensions in Music" has created the most interesting Kaiso Stories (Silkheart 158). She visited her grandmother in Trinidad regularly from kindergarten through her teen years. In remembrance of those experiences and her ancestral roots Ms. Victor narrates, sings, and otherwise deconstructs classic Calypso lyrics overtop a considerably sympathetic avant improvisational backdrop, as played by a formidable group of New-York-City-based artists: Roy Campbell, trumpet, etc., Daniel Carter, saxes, etc., William Parker, acoustic bass, etc., and Charles Downs, drums and percussion.

As I dug this recording I found there were three sorts of levels on which you could appreciate the performances, pretty much simultaneously. The first of course was Ms. Victor's poetic-free way with the lyrics, snatches of melodic phrases (or whole strains, in some cases) based on the Calypso melodies, and her more directly improvisational declamatory free vocalizing-narrating. The second level of appreciation centered for me around the interaction of vocals and ensemble. There are instrumental references to African and Trinidadian melodic and rhythmic phrases as well as free collective soloing of a wider sort. Then the third level is all about when the instrumentalists proceed with their improvisational performances in those sections where Fay lays out.

So we have a kind of three-tiered experience when listening to this one--and each one is valuable in itself.

On a strictly musical level everything comes together. William Parker's bass has an important function of articulating a rooted Africanism, perhaps more so than the others. It's yet another example of Parker's importance on the scene. It is a great pleasure to listen to his interaction with the free-Afro-Calypsian drumming of Charles Downs, who plays an important part in all this as well. Roy Campbell and Daniel Carter sound well and mesh together in a horn web that interlocks behind Ms. Victor when she is in the mix and tends to break out a bit more when she is not.

In the end you have a personal portrait of a person's connection to an ancestral home and all its experiential and political ramifications, and the need to be specific about what that means to her. This is one of the albums that takes a few listens to get used to. If you open your mind you'll find that there is nothing else quite like it. Those who like and follow the NY avant jazz scene will feel intrigued and connected to this. Those who aren't will nonetheless find it absorbing listening, if they remain open as they listen. A fine effort and a very singular one at that!