Lyrical Saxophonist Alexa Tarantino Releases Her Debut Album at Jazz at Lincoln Center

Alto saxophonist Alexa Tarantino is highly sought after in the New York jazz scene for her high-voltage, expressive sound. But she’s also found the time to do some writing over the last few years, which is where her debut album Winds Of Change – due to be streaming at Posi-Tone Records – comes in. The lineup on the record is killer: Christian Sands on piano, Nick Finzer on trombone, Joe Martin on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. She’s playing the album release show on May 28 at Dizzy’s Club, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is steep, $35, but if you can afford it, you’re in for a treat.

Sands’ Debussy-esque poitillisms and a graceful whoosh or three from Royston’s cymbals open the album’s concise first track, Wisp After Wisp. Tarantino play airily and spaciously as she builds to a catchy, allusively bluesy crescendo. Face Value is a briskly shuffling romp, Royston’s firing off his signature, counterintuitive accents, the bandleader jousting playfully with Sands, Finzer adding a coyly jovial solo.

She plays bright, alternately soaring and gritty soprano on Noriko Ueda’s catchy jazz waltz Seesaw, a feature for Tarantino in the all-female Diva Jazz Orchestra. Breeze follows an easygoing, vintage 40s sentimental swing tangent up to a hard-charging, blues-infused Sands solo.

Switching to alto flute, Tarantino’s take of Jobim’s Zingaro begins even breezier before Sands brings in the gravitas, Martin pulsing tersely over Royston’s quasi-bolero groove which they slowly edge into amiably dancing territory. Square One, her first-ever composition, is the album’s most epic track, built around a serisio, latin-tinged riff. Royston’s cleverly flickering shuffle underpins Sands’ steadily rising explorations, Tarantino alternating between serenity and shivery flash

The album’s catchiest track among many, Calm is a wistful song without words, Finzer parsing the melody gingerly, Tarantino taking flight as the group shift toward funk behind her. Undercurrent, centered around a bassline that’s more of a horn line, could be an Eric Dolphy jukebox jazz hit, Sands’ jaunty, New Orleans-tinged solo over Royston’s endless series of unexpected jabs.

The group burn through Ready or Not, Finzer ripsnorting and Tarantino spiraling over a tight but subtly shapeshifting, rapidfire shuffle. Tarantino and Sands open the closing ballad, Without as a duo, tenderly, her spacious, hopeful resonance over wary piano and an expansive groove. As memorable as all these tunes are, it’s a good bet Tarantino has even more up her sleeve.

 

Brooklyn’s Funnest Band Put Out One of the Most Casually Creepy Albums of 2019

Hearing Things are Brooklyn’s funnest band and have been for the last three years or so. They play dance music that’s equal parts film noir, soul, go-go music, surf rock, creepy psychedelia and new wave. They’ve also been more or less AWOL lately since the core of the band – alto saxopphonist Matt Bauder, organist JP Schlegelmilch and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza – have all been busy with other projects. But they’ve fimally made an album, Here’s Hearing Things – streaming at Bandcamp – and they’re playing the release show at around 9 PM at C’Mon Everybody on May 24. Cover is $10.

Live, the band often sound like the Doors playing surf music, which makes more sense than you might think considering that Ray Manzarek got his start in a surf band. This album starts out in high spirits, gets more sardonic and ends very darkly.

The first track is Shadow Shuffle, a deliciously twisted remake of Green Onions: the band vamp out the second verse instead of sticking with a creepy chromatic reharmonization of the old Booker T & the MG’s hit. Schlegelmilch swirls and Bauder punches in alto and baritone sax parts throughout the catchy Tortuga, a go-go tune as the Stranglers would have done it.

Wooden Leg is a subtly sardonic horror theme in the same vein as Beninghove’s Hangmen, Bauder fluttering furtively in the low registers as the band picks up steam: it’s the album’s most deliciously noir epic.

Likewise, Stalefish is a more traditional, horror surf take on Turkish psychedelia, guitarist Ava Mendoza firing off slashing chords over baritone guitarist Jonny Lam’s snappy, evil basslines. Houndstooth is an evil, faux-loungey take on a blue-flame roadhouse theme, animated by irrepressible flurrying drumwork and more whipcracking from Lam.

Hotel Prison would be slyly swayng take on balmy early 60s summer-place theme music if if wasn’t just a little too outside the lines. The outro is cruelly funny. Mendoze’s echeoey leads contrast with tongue-in-cheek, blippy orgnn. goodnatured sax iand expertly flurrying surf drums n Uncle Jack. Then the band completeley flip the scirpt with Trasnsit of Venus, the band’s first and most trippily macabre adventure in Ethiopian jazz,

The abum’s most epic number, Ideomotor opens with Bauder’s bass clarinet over jungly drums, Schleegelmilch;s organ slinking between them as a brooding, dubwise Ethopian theme gains velocicy. .The album’s fiinal cut is Triplestep, coalescing into a into a menacing mashup of Ethiopiques and a death row strut. Bauder gets the alto and baritone to get the Pink Panther to cross over to the dark side, up to a defiantly soaring alto solo that makes a killer coda for the album as a whole. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2019 page at the end of the year if we get that far.

Edgy, Catchy, Individualistic Guitar/Cello Sounds and a Barbes Gig From Sean Moran’s Sun Tiger

Guitarist Sean Moran inhabits an uneasy netherworld between jazz, abstract rock and metal. He’s the rare six-string player in any of those idioms who doesn’t waste notes. His album with his excellent, similarly multistylistic trio, Sun Tiger with cellist Hank Roberts and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza is streaming at Bandcamp. They’re opening a great twinbill at Barbes on May 21 at 7 PM; Balkan brass monsters Slavic Soul Party, who lately have been going to some even stranger mprovisational places than usual, play at 9 for a $10 cover. You may want to stay for the whole night.

The first track on the Sun Tiger album is Suns, catchy cello and then guitar riffs over a circular groove, offering absolutely no hint that the band will plunge into squalling doom metal. Finally, Roberts gets to run with the the carchy opening theme again.

One for Lacy is a twisted semi-strut with what seem to be good cop/bad cop roles (cello and guitar, respectively), some simmering slide work from Moran, a bit of a dancing bassline from Roberts, and many allusions to Monk. A Steve Lacy homage, maybe?

Without a pause, the band go straight into the album’s most epic track, Arc, skronk and sunbaked psychedelic guitar resonance contrasting with a little tongue-in-cheek metal frenzy. Sperrazza’s anvil snare – talk about a distinctive sound! – keeps the monster on the rails until everybody calmly and gently diverges, up to a hazy slight return.

Roberts’ droll Indian campfire licks over Sperrazza’s cymbal pointillisms open the slowly loping pastoral jazz theme Cheyenne, the album’s most sparse and arguably catchiest number. Roberts takes a turn at a little squealing metal over a quasi-qawwali beat as Big Shoes gets underway; then Moran puts the hammer down with a series of crunchy, syncopated riffs and all hell eventually breaks loose. A sailing Roberts pulls it together as Moran snipes and squiggles a little, then gets dirty again.

The surreal, rather morose ballad Eye Eye sounds like deconstructed Big Lazy, veering between purist postbop and more than a hint of noir: it’s the album’s most memorable track. Likewise, the final number, Percival, crawls like a scorpion and then hits a resolute stomp, Moran and Roberts both shifting in a split second between relative calm and distorted grit. Yet another example of the kind of casual magic that happens when translucent tunesmithing ends up in the hands of great improvisers.

Bewitching Singer Na-rae Lee Reverses the Curse in an Iconic Pansori Epic at Lincoln Center

Ong-nyeo lost her first husband when she was fifteen.

That’s how the story goes, anyway. In the ancient Korean pansori epic Byeongangsoe-ga, she’s a cursed woman in a cautionary tale about hubris and its consequences. In the American premiere of Na-rae Lee’s withering remake Thursday night at Lincoln Center, Ong-nyeo was transformed into a tragic heroine whose bravery in defying patriarchal norms leads to a grisly fate. Exactly what that fate was, star pansori singer Lee left to the audience to figure out. But the message was clear: in a misogynistic society, the perils a woman faces when she gains power over men can be treacherous to the extreme.

Considering how male-centric pansori narratives typically are, Lee acknowledges that there’s considerable irony in her choice of career, especially given her advocacy for women’s rights. So she decided to reinvent the tale of Byeongangsoe from his long-suffering wife’s point of view.

Lee sang that role and several others in Korean with a feral intensity, meticulously modulating a torrential vibrato that took on more power the further down the scale she went. English supertitles helped immensely. She was backed by an excellent, eclectic band – Hwayoung Lee on gayageum zither, Gina Hwang on geomungo bass zither, and Simun Lee on acoustic guitar – who began the show with unexpectedly subtle variations on an ominous chromatic riff that they would eventually turn into slightly muted doom metal when the guitarist kicked in with a primitive distortion effect.

The traditional version of the fable casts Ong-nyeo as a tragic character cursed to watch a succession of husbands die, often very gruesomely, since she’s too beautful for her own good. Na-rae Lee has recast her as defiant and fearless as she goes through man after man, curse be damned. Likewise, the one dude she thinks will help her reverse the curse, Byeongangsoe, is traditionally cast as a cartoonish, Falstaffian type. Here, the bandleader tore off the clown mask to reveal him as a smalltime thug who beats up on his wife since he’s not very good at picking on anyone his own size.

Throughout the show, there seemed to be a great deal of improvisation, often hectic, sometimes frantic or sepulchrally sinister, the music matching the narrative. Pensive, bossa-tinged folk-pop set the stage for the meeting between the two lovers; the ensuing marathon sex scene (sans disrobing) got plenty of droll bed-shaking effects. A lament for what Ong-nyeo ‘s scrub of a husband could have been – after the gods’ verdict took its grisly toll on him – brought to mind the Grateful Dead at their most vampy, with a biting gayageum solo. Byeongangsoe’s main theme, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a loopy march.

In her bright red dress, the singer held the crowd rapt. From a plaintive, understated, wordless lament, to throaty, shamanistic interludes where she turned loose a wide vibrato that approached diesel engine power and rumble, Lee spanned a range that even pansori singers seldom tackle. As the drama grew more grisly and the bodies piled up – this is a horror story of Gogolian proportions – the lighting went completely red several times, Lee scurrying furtively, then horrified, from one end of the stage to the other. A last-gasp attempt at an exorcism backfired spectacularly as the band played quasi trip-hop and then finally a dejected waltz. The audience sat stunned as the group let the music die away.

The performance was co-sponsored by the tireless folks at the Korean Cultural Service, who bring some amazing talent to this country: if only the US government advocated for American artists with a fraction of the Koreans’ tenacity! The next performance at the atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just north of 62nd Street is tomorrow night, May 16 at 7:30 PM. an entertaining annual multimedia event featuring an allstar cast from film and tv reading provocative selections from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Catchy, Anthemic, Innovative Newgrass Instrumentals and a Lower East Side Show from Fiddler Sumaia Jackson

Fiddler Sumaia Jackson writes catchy, soaring, individualistic instrumentals that draw equally on Americana as well as British folk traditions, along with a little jazz and hints of indie rock in places. Her debut album Mobius Trip is streaming at youtube. Jackson likes catchy riffs that circle round and round – get it? It’s fresh and invigorating and full of inspired, purposeful playing: if Chris Thile would for once give some thought to the melodies he used to play back when he was winning all those bluegrass awards, before he got all indie and boring, he might sound like this. Jackson and her band are at the basement-level room at the Rockwood on May 15 at 8:30 PM; cover is $15.

The first song is the title track, artfully shifting from a weird indie-chamber-newgrass mashup to a lilting, catchy waltz with an elegantly spiky duet between guitarist Colin Cotter and banjo player Jayme Stone. With its syncopation and allusive Celtic melody, Truth or Consequences is even catchier, Simon Chrisman’s hammered dulcimer solo bristling midway through.

Halifax has a rustic, enigmatically atmospheric opening, then Jackson and the banjo build a dizzyingly rhythmic circle dance. True to its title, Roundabout is sprightly clog dance – and is that a gong making those big big whooooooshes as the track gets going?

Smoke Jumpers is a big, crescendoing newgrass anthem – in 11/8 time. A pair of jigs – The Fog Rolls in, and Hi Karl Bye Karl – are next. Again, the band take their time, gently edging their way into the melody before the rhythm kicks in. Peanut, which is a lot closer to a traditional Irish reel, makes a good segue, as does There and Back, which has more distinctive vintage Appalachian flavor.

The band romp through a couple of reels, Buttonwillow and Gloucester Nightdriver, the dulcimer again adding incisive contrast with Jackson’s sailing lead lines before an unexpectedly murky jam in between. Old Granny Blair has some neat shifts between contrasting themes, then the band pick up the pace with the spirited, oldtimey Knoxville. The album closes with Paper Towns, a spare tableau that contemplates wide expanses, something that bands on the road know a little bit about. It’s inspiring to see how Jackson and her crew take a legacy style like bluegrass and make something completely new and exciting out of it.

Atlas Maior Bring Their Intoxicating Middle Eastern and Greek Jams to Fort Greene

Austin band Atlas Maior play an exhilarating blend of Middle Eastern and Greek music that often looks further north to the Balkans. With oud, violin, sax and a rock rhythm section, they play driving, rhythmic instrumentals which veer from rampaging Macedonian-tinged jams, to sunny Aegean grooves and haunting Turkish-laced themes. Their new album Riptide is streaming at Spotify. They like epics: imagine a more organic version of the New York Gypsy All-Stars and you wouldn’t be far off. Atlas Maior are playing Sisters Brooklyn at 900 Fulton St., just north of the Cinton-Washington stop on the C train on May 14 at 8 PM. Cover is $10.

The album opens with The Curse, Joshua Thomson’s blippy alto sax in tandem with Charlie Lockwood’s oud over drummer Ted Camat’s allusively rat-a-tat Balkan rhythms. The buzzy microtonal oud solo out is killer. The title track, Riptide, is a hypnotically vamping platform for a long sax solo; likewise, Cumbia Raposa, which turns out to be anything but a cumbia.

Nastaran begins with a quote from the surf classic Misirlou and stomps along from there with a tireless Macedonian pulse: the shift from major to minor is sudden and breathtaking. Chamber of Mirrors rises from a long, acerbically crescendoing chromatic violin solo from Roberto Riggio over a droning backdrop. Then the rhythm kicks in and the sax comes dancing in, and the band pounce up to a simmering roadhouse oud solo. If psychedelic Middle Eastern sounds are your thing, this is your jam.

Oryx, a suspenseful bluel-flame sax-and-buzuq intro, segues into Trata, a briskly pulsing, wickedly catchy Turkish-inspired number. If surf rock had existed on Cyprus in the 1920s, it might sound like Idda!!, the sax sailing over tight, catchy, minor-key buzuq/bass riffage.

Huzzam Hive, a diptych, begins with a tricky, dancing theme, some neat echo effects between sax and oud, and a tantalizing, careeningly haphazard Aegean solo from Lockwood. The second half is more distinctly Greek-sounding, carefree and hypnotic all at once.

The band give the album an epic coda, Osman Pehlivan, opening with an edgy Turkish hook and eventually take it breathlessly doublespeed,, a deliciously rapidfire oud solo bookending somewhat less ferocious chromatics from the sax. Speaking of which, sometimes that instrument seems superfluous:. Admittedly, it takes daunting technique to ride off the rails into microtonal territory, but if Thomson would go there, that would put some otherworldly (and regionally appropriate0 icing on this sonic confection.

Kayhan Kalhor and Kiya Tabassian Play a Historic Concert at CUNY

About half an hour before their show last night, Kayhan Kalhor and Kiya Tabassian were chilling in the shade of a scaffold just north of 34th Street. Nobody seemed to recognize them. They may not be household names in this city, but they are elesewhere – and they should be

Kalhor is best known as this era’s great virtuoso of the kamancheh, the Iranian stringed instrument (he plays a custom-made model with the range of both a violin and a cello, called the Shah Kaman). He’s also one of the foremost composers of the past couple of decades. Whiile he also plays the setar lute, he’s very rarely played it onstage until recently. In fact, until yesterday evening’s engagement at CUNY’s Elebash Hall, he’d never played a full concert on the instrument in New York. A sold-out crowd gave him and his protege Tabassian a standing ovation before the show began – they knew they’d be witness to history.

Rather than a duel, the two setarists’ ninety or so uninterrupted minutes onstage turned out to be a clinic in how to build something transcendent. Although the show didn’t come across as a conversation between teacher and student, Tabassian’s ideas, in general, were more directly poignant, while Kalhor took his time.

The musicians’ individual styles complemented each other. For most of the show, Tabassian stuck to stinging, often heartbreakingly beautiful riffs which contrasted with rain-washed, lingering chords and deftly interpolated countermelodies: he has an amazing sense of harmony.Yet when he finally cut loose, toward the end of the show, he displayed blazing speed to match that poignancy

Kalhor’s atttack on the strings is more feathery than incisive, but that’s probably a good thing, considering how fast his fingers were flurrying on the strings. Consider: if you tried tremolo-picking a guitar, fingerstyle as these two were doing, your fingers would be a bloody mess in seconds flat.

Throughout the show, the duo exchanged riffs, often echoing each other, other times developing subtle variations on a slowly shifting series of themes. Each player gave the other plenty of room to raise the electricity or shift into more shadowy emotional terrain. Taking a brooding, initial downward theme in an Iranian dastgah mode approximating the western minor scale, the two embellisehd it with a groove that grew to just short of a gallop. They then backed away and for a little while, midway through, they edged into a more resonantly chordal, sunnier tableau.

But that didn’t last, and Tabassian was the first to reintroduce a subtle variation on the plaintive initial theme. Kalhor took a turn on the mic, singing a practically imploring couple of verses in his resonant baritone, at one point putting down his setar and letting Tabassian play the changes. Finally, Kalhor let an enigmatic open chord linger, then looked at Tabassian, as if to say, ‘What if we’re both wrong?” They gently made their way out of that enigma and ended the show with an unexpectedly muted if angst-fueled minimalism.

The Elebash Hall concert series – programmed by Isabel Soffer of Live Sounds – is more or less monthly and features a lot of music like this that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else, watch this space.

Sizzling Klezmer Jamband Yale Strom’s Broken Consort Get a Head Start on This Year’s Festivities

Violinist Yale Strom is the frontman of a sizzling klezmer group called Hot Pstromi. His new album Shimmering Lights, with his Broken Consort – streaming at Rockpaperscissors – is even hotter, a spine-tingling, dynamic, chromatically delicious mix of new arrangements of classic, un-cheesy Hanukah themes from across the diaspora. The Middle East and Andalucia are well represented throughout an album of what could be called first-class acoustic Levantine jamband epics.

Amos Hoffman’s oud taqsim, beginning with a distinctly funky Moroccan flair and spiraling upward, introduces the album’s bracing, opening epic, O Mighty Stronghold. When the sttrings come sweeping in after the first verse, the effect is visceral. Likewise, Alexander Greenbaum’s stark, stygian cello solo midway through, and the big, exhililating violin/cello duel between the bandleader and Greenbaum afterward. It’s yet another reminder of how rich the mutual source of classic Arabic and Jewish music is.

The Hanukah party anthem Khanike, Oh Khanike has a rustic, shapeshifting acoustic arrangement, frontwoman Elizabeth Schwartz’s assertive delivery over a spiky backdrop, mandolin contrasting with the rhythmic washes of the bass. Who except maybe Andy Statman would have expected the wry bluegrass breakdown midway through?

The ladino theme Bring Out the Tray is a stately processional: after seven more or less hypnotic minutes, the solos kick in, first the violin, then the oud, for a mighty payoff that winds up with another, slightly less ferocious duel for strings.

There’s a little guitar jazz from Hoffman to kick off Latkes, possibly the most exalted celebration of potato pancakes ever recorded: among the highlights are a doublespeed jam, biting cello giving way to bubbly electric guitar, a big violin crescendo, and some Eastern European flatpicking.

Azeremos la Merenda has a pouncing flamenco groove, wary echoes of Turkish music, and an adrenalizing cello solo. Beshir Mizmor gives Strom a stately backdrop for some stratospheric sizzle. Schwartz indulges in some scatting in Eight Little Brothers, a Djangoesque Romany jazz remake, while La Fiesta de la Hanukia has echoes of flamenco.

With a punchy bass solo, more searing violin and crackling oud, L’chod Chanukah mashes up a scampering shtetl party theme with Django Reinhardt and some newgrass. The final cut is The Fool Over Yonder, an antifascist anthem from a few hundred years ago reinvented as low-key guitar swing that’s just as relevant today as it was back when it was probably played on oud, and a lot more slowly. Look for this on the best albums of 2019 page at the end of the year. By the way – if you’ve read this far, would you still be here if the first sentence was something like “Here’s an album of old Hanukah songs that’s fun all year long?”

 

Fearless Individualism and Fearsome Chops from Trumpeter Jaimie Branch

Trumpeter Jaimie Branch has made a lot of waves with her sepulchral extended technique, which is only one of the many, many weapons in her arsenal. She has a rich, resounding Wadada Leo Smith-like tone and fast fingers on the valves, yet she’s more likely to build a song without words around catchy riffage. In the proud AACM tradition, the native Chicagoan is a rare example of an improviser with a laserlike sense of melody, yet she also isn’t afraid of controlled chaos – and the other kind of chaos too. Her debut album Fly or Die, one of the most entertaining jazz releases of the year so far, is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing Roulette tomorrow night, May 4 at 8 PM with her drum-trumpet duo Anteloper and then with the quartet on the new album; advance tix are $18 and still available as of today.

Tomeka Reid’s cello and Jason Ajemian’s bass exchange funky riffs while the bandleader’s terse, bluesy hooks and spine-tingling flurries rise over drummer Chad Taylor’s splattershot shuffle as the opening number, simply titled Theme 001, gets underway. A gorgeous decay, guitarist Matt Schneider plucking his way into the picture, triggers a segue into Meanwhile, a hazy, horizontal intelude where Taylor gets to spin around his kit and keep everybody centered

From there they segue once again, into Theme 002, a catchy, plucky cello tune over Ajemian’s steady, wry vintage ska beat: Lloyd Knibb would be proud to hear what the guy does here. Branch and Reid walk slightly different paths on separate sides of the street

Cornetists Josh Berman and Ben Lamar Gay join Branch for Leaves, in a wistful and then anguished reverb-drenched, twistedly produced call-and-response: the repercussions, everybody milling around uneasily, take up half the track. The Storm draws on downward slides from the strings and emphatic, steady drum work awash in a sea of reverb, Branch untethered and alone but resolute, completely unafraid. The group march their ghostly way out.

Waltzer is not a waltz but a gently marching backdrop for Branch to make a slow trail in from desolation to vintage 50s Miles ebullience, Taylor and Ajemian bubbling as Reid eases her in with a hypnotic stroll. The album’s title track is a sputtering, spacious solo miniature, followed by the catchy, bluesily bustling Theme Nothing: Schneider’s evil waterslide runs are a highlight, as is Taylor’s quasi-Balkan, rat-a-tat rimshot attack behind Branch’s searing rattle. The gentle, nocturnal guitar miniature Back at the Ranch closes the album on an unexpected note. Expect similarly counterintuitive things from this fearlessly individualistic talent in the years to come.

Stark, Almost Shockingly Catchy String Tunes and Improvisations From Allstar Trio Hear in Now

Violinist Mazz Swift, cellist Tomeka Reid and bassist Silvia Bolognesi all have busy careers as bandleaders, but they also occasionally play in an edgy, often stunningly catchy trio they call Hear in Now. The project is bracingly and deliciously uncategorizable: ostensibly the music is string jazz, and there’s a lot of improvisation, but also more than a hint of Italian folk, the blues and even string metal. Their latest album Not Living in Fear is streaming at Bandcamp. Reid may be airing out any material from it in two sets at the Jazz Gallery on April 26, the first a duo with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, the second with her quartet including Fujiwara, guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Jason Roebke. Cover is $25.

The trio open the album with a jam, rising from hints of a stately march to shivery squall…and then Frankenstein looks in the window but keeps going. Leaving Livorno is every bit the lament the title suggests, Bolognesi’s stark bowed lines taking centerstage over a whispery backdrop.

Transiti has a staggered staccato pulse, errie close harmonies and a sharp, acidically emphatic cello solo. Requiem for Charlie Haden is unexpectedly catchy, despite the astringency of the circling strings. The aptly titled Circle is even bouncier, bordering on parlor pop in the same vein as groups like the Real Vocal String Quartet: it’s neat how the group shift from punchy to a balletesque strut.

Bolognesi’s steady bowing anchors the sailing melody overhead in the miniature Billions and Billions, another strikingly direct, catchy number. Swift sings the album’s title cut, its message of indomitability set to keening high string harmonies and plucky chords over growly bass.

The album’s second improvisation, interestingly, is just as memorable, waltzing intricately around a circling, blues-tinged hook. Terrortoma is the most darkly bluesy track, with its tight, bracing haronies. The longing in Prayer for Wadud – a diptych – is visceral, Swift’s spare, resonant riffs, Reid and Bolognesi joining underneath with a brooding, bowed riff.

They open Cantiere Orlando with neo-baroque elegance, then hit a spiky interlude and artfully bring the main theme back. They close with the liltingly anthemic waltz Last Night’s Vacation and then the showstopper Cultural Differences, shifting gears hard through minimalism, some atmospherics and then shivery, metal-tinged phrasing. There’s really nothing like this out there.