Don Aliquo: Growth

On Growth, his eighth album as a leader, it is said that Nashville-based saxophonist Don Aliquo "pushes past his established comfort zone and into more precarious and challenging improvisational territory." While that may well be true, another truism is that the harmonic vocabulary of contemporary jazz has remained essentially unchanged for more than eight decades, and Aliquo does nothing to alter the blueprint. He simply approaches improvisation in his own way while embracing time-honored parameters.

In other words, this isn't "free" jazz unfastened from conventional melody, harmony or rhythm—and that, in one listener's opinion, is a good thing, as it means that Aliquo's quartets are exemplifying modern jazz to the best of their ability and should be appraised on that basis. The word "quartets" is used because there are two, on four numbers each, the first with trumpeter Rod McGaha on the front line, the second with guitarist Steve Kovalcheck sitting in.

It should be noted from the outset that Aliquo is a capable soloist on tenor sax (most numbers) or bass clarinet ("For the Vulnerable") whose special qualities lie not so much in anomalous detours as in his ability to decipher every theme and wrest the most intensity from it. The fact that he wrote and arranged all of them is no doubt useful in that respect. McGaha and Kovalcheck are efficient but no more than that, while the rhythm sections (bassists Jonathan Wires or Jacob Jezioro, drummers Marcus Finnie or Danny Gottlieb) enact their supporting roles without fuss or bother (Wires and Finnie solo admirably on "Lower Broadway Rundown," Jezioro on "Naked Statues," he and Gottlieb on "Blues for Buffy and Doug").

The music traces the same pattern, serving for the most part as a sturdy launching pad for the various soloists while leaving little or no after-effects. Those whose appetites clamor for daring enterprises that lean toward modernism without eschewing tradition may find that Growth embodies precisely the proper ingredients to appease their hunger.