Aaron Parks: Little Big III

After debuting with a clutch of albums on Keynote around the start of the millennium, and then spending five years with Terence Blanchard, Aaron Parks emerged as a fully-fledged bandleader with his album Invisible Cinema on Blue Note in 2008. On it, Parks fronted a quartet completed by guitarist Mike Moreno, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Eric Harland. The group's bag was the capacious one known as post-genre, but the music was indisputably jazz for all that. After spells on ECM and Ropeadope, Parks has returned to Blue Note with another, similarly constituted quartet, Little Big, this one completed by guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard and drummer Jongkuk Kim. Little Big III, co-produced by Parks and Blue Note head honcho Don Was, is the group's third studio album.

The vibe, up to a point, is the same as on the 2008 album—post-genre, still jazz-based though on three tracks edging a little closer to rock ("Sports," "Delusions") and Americana ("Willamina"). Check the YouTube below. The key difference is that Parks has simplified his compositions and arrangements this time. These were hardly complex to begin with but their occasional rhythmic displacements and harmonic surprises brought depth to the music. The press materials for the new album, presumably quoting Parks, describe this artistic decision as "sidestepping any surplus of harmonic information." A more objective commentator might call it "dumbing down." Time will tell whether the album's replay shelf-life is correspondingly foreshortened, as one suspects it may be.