Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Javier Red: Life & Umbrella

4

Javier Red: Life & Umbrella

By

View read count
Javier Red: Life & Umbrella
The secret behind Life & Umbrella is that Chicago-based, Mexican-born pianist/composer Javier Red is a studied composer who puts a great deal of thought into the music he presents, both to his peers and to the world. But that music never feels calculated like an equation with an obvious answer. Just the exact opposite. So it is with wiry, creative glee that Red and his Imagery Converter—drummer Gustavo Cortiñas, bassist Ben Dillinger and saxophonist Jake Wark—double down on their bold debut, pronouncement, Ephemeral Certainties (Delmark Records, 2019) with this acrobatic twelve song set.

With each of the twelve titles meant to encompass the many traits associated with his son's autism, Red and company fracture and disrupt the pianist's potent compositions with a wry confidence bordering on the wanton urge to bust things up just for the hell of it, then swear by the outcome. Tossing the very concept of time and its dominion over to the wind, key moments along the spectrum such as the decisively elusive "Imaginary Friend," the metric elasticity of "Brain Checking," the reflective cognition of "Resilience Cycle," turn all this disjointedness and dissonance into an actual, fully functional whole. In other words,

As the quartet has its way with theme and content, each player has standout moments throughout Life & Umbrella. Wark especially parlays his tone and blue-collar dynamism into "Circles," where his initial breathiness stimulates the conversation. Ray rolls in with a particularly acute and agile solo which Wark then reclaims with a deeper, more resonant intonation. Cortiñas' crisp sense of deconstruction is palpable on each track, especially the opening "Thought Unable to Be Contained" and the above-mentioned "Brain Checking." Bassist Dillinger's fluidity with the angular constructs and demands of "Different Tempos" and the softer, more fluctuating lines of "Interior Worlds" prove him a player able to keep things balanced within the ever-moving crux.

Even with the pianist's stated mission that the music be a bridge of understanding between neurotypicals and the autistic, Life & Umbrella is a collaborative work as epitomized in the closing epic, "Future, Umbrella, Life," where Ray, Cortiñas, Wark, and Dillinger daringly rile and rumble then come to a collective understanding that we all stand taller when we stand alongside each other.

Track Listing

Thoughts Unable To Be Contained; The Happiness Of Hope; Imaginary Friend; Brain Check; Umbrella; Resilience Cycle; This Is What They Found; Life; Interior World; Different Tempos; Choices; Future, Umbrella, And Life.

Personnel

Album information

Title: Life & Umbrella | Year Released: 2023 | Record Label: Desafio Candente

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

The Sound of Raspberry
Tatsuya Yoshida / Martín Escalante
All In Motion
Dave Redmond
Cat & The Hounds
Colin Hancock's Jazz Hounds Featuring Catherine...

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.