Brendan Eder Ensemble: Cape Cod Cottage

When the new owners of a Cape Cod saltbox house went to insulate their attic, they found photos, manuscripts and TEAC tapes left by the previous occupant. His name was Edward Blankman, a retired dentist from Pennsylvania, who moved to Cape Cod after his wife's death. These newly uncovered recordings were sent to Jazz Dad Records who took on the task of restoring them for release. Mostly a tribute to Blankman's late wife Natalie, they reveal an old soul who wandered the island finding inspiration for his minimalist jazzy soundscapes.

Nice story though it is, none of the above is true. Cape Cod Cottage is in fact a superbly realised pastiche created by L.A.-based composer Brendan Eder. Noted for his collaborations with film directors such as Ari Aster, he also fronts the chamber group Brendan Eder Ensemble. Cape Cod Cottage sees the quintet evoking a 1970s vibe, to echo what the fictional Blankman might have created with a team of Boston jazz club players, to follow Eder's invented narrative. Jazz Dad Records and its owner Lionel Stibley are also pure fiction.

This project comes courtesy of English label Worried Songs, whose talent for procuring American fingerstyle guitarists is enviable. Their first jazz release, Cape Cod Cottage is packaged with invented liner notes and archive photographs, to such a convincing point that fact and fiction blur. But the music must stand up regardless of this imaginative hoax and it certainly does. Using brass, woodwind, Wurlitzer and a low-key rhythm section, Eder gives us twenty-one reveries of intimate nostalgia, each one a moving and thoughtful sketch. The result is rather like Moondog, Stan Getz and Dave Brubeck jamming to a backdrop of the ocean's roaring breakers. Eder's longest piece here lasts only three minutes and his titles have a haiku directness, as evidenced by "Overgrown Garden," "Snowing," "Your Bliss" and "Where Else."

Maybe the unfussy sounds are meant to evoke Blankman's spartan lifestyle amid the Cape's oaks and dunes. Dreamy but not schmaltzy, the numbers arouse Blankman's pangs of regret, sifting the relics of his past life. Or is Eder using this work allegorically to purge his own sorrows? "Tuesday At The Pond" features soft electric piano and breezy alto sax, while "Sunlight Through The Leaves" seems to drift in on the tide, then flow easefully back. But variation comes with "Cape Cod Cottage" where mellow funk and fluttering bass meet a folky flute. "Up" is a brief foray into mild Motown grooves and "Heat" has an ethereal soul pulse. Also notable are the balmy bluesy flourishes of "West Coast" and sultry Oriental phrasings on "Four."

The album's yearning core is expressed via "Natalie," a keyboard croon of elegant wonder, and through the graceful poise of "Miss Her." But this is no self-indulgent vanity project, not when such a feeling of contentment lurks in the storyline of loss and loneliness. Eder allows Blankman a quiet joy in just being and moving; his own musical language making a bond with nature.

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