Jay Anderson's Deepscape

I've been on the road for the last couple of weeks, first to a wedding in Honolulu that I dubbed the Blood Diamond Wedding since it was absolutely beautiful and perfect and ambitious in so many ways and yet some lives may have been lost. (The Cecil B. DeMille joke in Blazing Saddles is my favorite.) Then I flew all the way back to JFK, the new non-stop from NYC to Honolulu, drove down to Connecticut to pick up Lucy, drove back to Rochester, got up the next morning and drove to Chicago and covered the AXPONA 2019. Now I am home, sick as a dog with a chest cold. Is this the Honoluluflu, or is it just another trade show virus? At any rate, I've rested the last couple of days and wasn't really listening to music--my head was too congested and nothing sounded right.

Today, something sounded really right, and it's this new CD from bassist Jay Anderson called Deepscape. This is a sparse work, mostly made up from improvisations between Anderson, sax and clarinet player Billy Drewes, cornet player Kirk Knuffke, drummer Matt Wilson, harmonium player Frank Kimbrough and percussionist Rogerio Boccato. This is a diverse world up on stage, a flexible crew who seem to have a deep knowledge of various jazz sub-genres, and yet they create vast amounts of space between the performances so that your mind wanders from musician to musician, catching up on all the conversations that are going on at the same time.

Anderson has been a jazz mainstay since the '90s, performing with the Woody Herman Orchestra, Toots Thielemans, Lee Konitz and wait a minute...Bowie and Chaka Khan and Zappa and Tom Waits and even Celine Dion? Wow. He includes a couple of Keith Jarrett jams that set up the structure throughout, long and singular improvisations that can only be heard right here, this way. He builds quartets and quintets and then tears them down and starts again with a simple duet. It's an approach that sends you back on your heels once or twice because it sounds so new and familiar at the same time, but much of the time the music seems to be waiting for another element to join, but that element doesn't arrive because the music is set up to observe the absence of the one. That's a world apart from needing something more. This doesn't.

That's digging deep into these improvisations, which is why Deepscape can be an intellectual exercise as much as an hour of sparkling, dynamic jazz. There are some brash ideas here, floating in a sea of math. You might find yourself thinking too much about Deepscape while you're listening to it. It gives you plenty to chew on in terms of time signatures and the mysteriously austere arrangements. That doesn't mean you won't get swept away by Anderson and his persistently imaginative bass playing--and his strangely new style of jazz improv.