Michael Sarian: Live at Cliff Bell's

This is music for the adventurous, especially those with the ears to deal with unusual harmonies. Michael Sarian is a now-Canadian trumpet player in the mold of Enrico Rava. His gift is his sound: dark, burnished, probing, even tentative at times. He is fond of half-valve expeditions into the upper register, which, if executed properly, can smear a tone between a squeal and a shriek. It is more than appropriate for the sort of music he plays, insinuating and beguiling, even when the figures he crafts are reminiscent of the engravings on an instrument of 1940s vintage. Sarian sounds like a Middle Eastern version of Terrence Blanchard, which is nothing if not intriguing.

The compositions, primarily originals, are seemingly largely modal, and unusual, at that. "Primo" is described as, and is, a fast and gritty swing based on a tritone progression, what Sarian describes as feeling like "an altered blues," which is a good description, even if an up-tempo interlude somewhat leads elsewhere. "Aurora," owes its title to the awful mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado in 2012 that cured many of a desire to enter a movie theater. The harmonies are basic suspended chords enclosing a melody, and if the tune feels grim, well it may, because the reality was horrific. There is an excellent meditative bass solo by Marty Kenny. "The Pilgrim" is a lengthy composition based on a solo by Enrico Rava. It is medium tempo, but feels up, perhaps because of the straight eights in which it is supposed to be played. "Yi Ku Ghimethn Chim Gidi" is based on Armenian poetry, and, one supposes, sounds the way Arminian poetry set to music indeed sounds. "Portrait of Haile" has Sarian and dummer Nathan Ellman-Bell building to a swirling climax, therein joined by Kenny and pianist Santiago Leibson. "Living at the End of the World" at least begins with the nearest thing to a singing solo that Sarian will play, but there is always a hard, percussive edge, and an inevitable flurry of notes that is the aural equivalent of Impressionism. Interesting, if not standard fair for a contemporary trumpet player, and probably more edgy than a lot of jazz audiences will hear nowadays hear.

Still, edgy is good, the music is propulsive and the playing all executed at a very high level. Not for everyone, but then the avant-garde never was.

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