Richie Beirach and Gregor Huebner's Crossing Borders

It's strange that I don't necessarily think of Zoho Music when it comes to big band recordings. There's always an intimacy involved, a deeply personal story that's being told from the point of view of a musician/composer who was born in one place and now plays jazz in another. Pianist Richie Beirach and violinist Gregor Huebner have enlisted the help of the WDR Big Band in Germany for Crossing Borders, which sounds like a perfect title for a Zoho release. These two musicians have taken the idea of how politics divides us and they have created both a piano concerto and a violin concerto, plus a handful of smaller works, to straddle the fine line between jazz and classical music.

Both Beirach and Huebner were classically trained, so they have the chops to pull it off. What's remarkable about Crossing Borders, however, is how the original ideas within these compositions float eerily between that gray space between the genres and occasionally toss in something that sounds almost familiar. In Huebner's Violin Concerto No. 3, for example, there's a spot where the violinist (Huebner, of course) starts flirting with Arvo Part's Fratres and does an evocative approximation of Gidon Kremer's take on this ethereal and haunting theme. This is anything but traditional big band jazz, in other words.

After spending way too much of 2018 submerged in contemporary big band jazz, I started to search for performances in this genre that strayed from the norm. Even in the most ambitious works, there's a desire to punctuate big ideas with a wall of sound, usually led by copious brass. In Crossing Borders, those temptations are resisted with the most astonishing moments occurring within the deep silences and empty spaces between those flourishes. This is one of the main reasons why I like the WDR Big Band--they're always willing to sound different and to do something that hasn't been done before, at least by a big band jazz ensemble.

That means, of course, that this is another ambitious and exceptional release from Zoho Music, one that stands out from most contemporary jazz releases. There's a looseness to these performances, a sense that there are no boundaries and no rules. (The title is a strong indicator of the themes here.) But this isn't messy music in the least--the melodies are tight and the ideas musically pleasing. It's the unexpectedness of the structure of Crossing Borders that's so unusual, and so surprising.

Fred Farell's Distant Song

A few months ago I reviewed a trio of male jazz singers, and I knocked these gentlemen for having voices that were a little too light, a little too classically pure for jazz. These three, and a few others I can think of, are fantastic singers and deserve to have flourishing careers, but each one needed, for different reasons, to find material that better matched their voices. They hadn't been roughed up enough by life to really sing the jazz they'd recorded.

Fred Farell doesn't have that problem. Now in his fifth decade singing jazz, Farell knows the right balance of weariness and wisdom required for an effective jazz ballad. On Distant Song, his first release for the new Whaling City Sound label, he's teamed up with with horn player Dave Liebman and pianist Richie Beirach to deliver ten original songs that are imbued with the sadness and longing that comes from singing a lifetime's worth of jazz. The idea here is fairly simple--Liebman and Beirach compose the music, Farell supplies the lyrics. In other words, this is a very personal project for this trio. You can hear it in every word that's spoken, and every note that's played.

There is an interesting fourth member of the team here--the studio. I'm not sure if this is the Whaling City Sound's signature or not, since this appears to be their third release (catalog number wcs 103), but it is distinctive. Farell's voice does indeed sound distant and cavernous, as if his performance was captured a long time ago. It's soaked with echo and reverb, which magnifies that slight wavering in his voice and underlines the aforementioned weariness. I'm sure it's an intended effect, and it's a valid choice, but it does take a little bit of time to adjust to it--especially when the keyboards and horns are so clear and present and forward. When it comes to intimate trios like this, I prefer the sound to bounce easily between the performers and even reflect what the others are doing...even when they're not doing anything. That sensation is minimalized here.

But that's not a flaw. It's just a different perspective, a conscious choice to make an elegy sound like an elegy. Distant Song isn't a happy or energetic album. It's a solemn one, full of longing and regret. All three of these gentlemen seem to know these emotions inside and out, and there's absolutely no pretense to be found. There are plenty of times where you need an album just like this one.