Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Herculaneum: Herculaneum III

239

Herculaneum: Herculaneum III

By

View read count
Herculaneum: Herculaneum III
In some respects what we have here is music that's a step on from Jimmy Giuffre's work in the 1950s, but if it's the chamber music notion that unites the two bodies of work across the intervening half-century, it's clear that this band marches to a rhythmically more vigorous aesthetic. The music is at times alive with a kind of tensile energy that similarly invalidates the Giuffre comparison, but what unites the two is a sense of exploration, of goals ill-defined and thus made all the more worthy of pursuit.

As much as anywhere else, this comes across on "Prosecco/mcv," where looseness of rhythmic input is perhaps more compelling than the solo voices, especially when an off-kilter unison passage has the effect of forewarding David McDonnell's alto sax solo. He's clearly fired by what's going on around him, though not to the extent that he resorts to screaming through his horn. The resulting collective fire is a refreshing one.

"Mahogany" has trace elements of the quartet Paul Desmond had with Jim Hall; the lyricism that was always a hallmark of that group is here in shades, but in his solo, guitarist John Beard favors a harder, less harmonically oblique approach than Hall.

Echoes of time-honored West Coast tropes are rife on "Egyptian Femme," although in this case it's the more abstract work of some of Shelly Manne's groups that hold sway. This doesn't matter anyway as such is the nature of the music these days that perhaps that represents one of the many avenues less explored.

The ensemble's balance is best exemplified by "Red Dawn," where the underlying anxiety of the line is offset by the deft handling of material. The chorale of the horns serves as a jump-off point for improvisation on the part of both McDonnell again on alto sax and trumpeter Patrick Newbery, whose sometimes quasi-militaristic phrasing conjures up the parade ground at some even more dystopian point in the future.

"Eyeball" is the piece least accommodating with the past. Meter is largely abandoned at first, in favor of vaguely ominous washes of sound, before things settle down in a less abstract vein. Again the horns serve a kind of choral purpose which sets them at odds with the rhythmic momentum, but the resulting tension, never resolved as it is, affords the soloists the greater freedom.

Track Listing

The Sparrow; Prosecco/mcv; Italian Ice; Golden monarch; Eyeball; Lavender Panther; Egyptian Femme; Red Dawn; Mahogany.

Personnel

Patrick Newbery: trumpet, flugelhorn; Nick Broste: trombone; David McDonnell: alto sax, clarinet; Nate Lepine: flute; Greg Danek: bass; Dylan Ryan: drums, vibes.

Album information

Title: Herculaneum III | Year Released: 2009 | Record Label: Clean Feed Records

Tags

Comments


PREVIOUS / NEXT




Support All About Jazz

Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

More

Tramonto
John Taylor
Ki
Natsuki Tamura / Satoko Fujii
Duality Pt: 02
Dom Franks' Strayhorn
The Sound of Raspberry
Tatsuya Yoshida / Martín Escalante

Popular

Old Home/New Home
The Brian Martin Big Band
My Ideal
Sam Dillon
Ecliptic
Shifa شفاء - Rachel Musson, Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders
Lado B Brazilian Project 2
Catina DeLuna & Otmaro Ruíz

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.