Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double: March

Drummer Tomas Fujiwara's March, another offering from his Triple Double sextet, was recorded in December 2019, prior to the widespread racial unrest that followed the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others in 2020. But it feels completely of a piece with those protests, with an unsettled anger and impatience that animate every moment of this absorbing album. Creating music that seems perfectly suited for a tumultuous age, Fujiwara's compositional instincts are spot-on, and he once again marshals the talents of his colleagues with an assurance cultivated by years of fruitful partnership.

The band's debut release, Triple Double (Firehouse 12, 2017), set the template that is continued here, with Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver on drums, along with the guitar pairing (Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook), and a trumpet/cornet tandem (Ralph Alessi and Taylor Ho Bynum). The diverse permutations available are there, and Fujiwara takes full advantage of them. The opener, "Pack, Up, Coming For You," begins with one of the "trios," Fujiwara with Halvorson and Bynum, working up an odd-meter ostinato from Halvorson before the other three take over, this time with Seabrook on the ostinato part alongside Cleaver and Alessi. Only at the end of the track do all six musicians come together for a bracing finish.

Other tracks experiment with other configurations. The drummers careen off each other during the spirited "Life Only Gets More," as do both guitarists, with Halvorson taking the melody first and Seabrook taking on a support role, before the roles reverse and Seabrook gets a chance to step forward. The horns get a bit more leverage on "Wave Shake and Angle Bounce," with Alessi and Bynum in full flight over the seething rhythmic foundation provided by the guitars and drums. Seabrook and Halvorson generate the turbulence here; rarely has Halvorson sounded so aggressive on her instrument, and Seabrook's own fervid contributions do a lot to ignite the horns' firepower.

The music does occasionally lower its temperature, as Bynum and Alessi explore a plaintive reverie at the start of "The March and the Storm Before the Quiet of the Dance," but the track works its way into a frenzy before too long, as the group again gives full voice to its discontent, with Halvorson and Seabrook riding a manic prog-rock groove from Fujiwara and Cleaver. And the paradoxically-named "Docile Fury Ballad" is just as riveting, but with the emphasis placed much more on the fury than on the docility. Only on "Silhouettes in Smoke" does the group stay in a somber register, as Fujiwara plays here on vibraphone to complement some languid musings by the horns, while the guitarists manage to hold themselves in check for the piece's duration.

The only deficiency of the album, really, is its relative brevity. Its overall runtime of 53 minutes is deceptive, as the last track consists of a lengthy, 17-minute Fujiwara/Cleaver drum improvisation, "For Alan, Part II." A follow-up to "For Alan," the drum-based dedication to Fujiwara's mentor Alan Dawson found on Triple Double, the track pulses with the combined power of the two percussionists locked in airtight rapport; but it can't match the collective intensity of the full sextet at its most unruly. Regardless, what we do get from Triple Double on March is absolutely first-rank, and more than enough to hold us over until the group's next outing.

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