Jorge Sylvester Spontaneous Expressions: Mayhem At Large--The Last Baha'i Session

This two-disc set by saxophonist Jorge Sylvester's Spontaneous Expressions documents the last of the Tuesday evening jazz concerts at the Baha'i Center on East 11th Street in New York City. According to the jacket notes, the event was recorded live in March 2020. If that is so, Sylvester's listeners have earned top prize as the quietest audience in recorded history. Nary a sound. Either they were fast asleep or expressing an opinion.

The discs themselves are...well, the words "unusual" and "strange" spring quickly to mind. The first two tracks in each set are devoted entirely to Sylvester's a cappella improvisations on alto saxophone, followed by duets on Disc 1 with voice, French horn, tuba, piano and guitar, and on Disc 2 with trumpet and drums. Each session then closes with a "sketch" for octet.

Make no mistake, this is "free" jazz with a capital "F." The assumption must be made that everyone knows his or her role, even though the music itself often seems held together by a rather thin and threadbare string. That is not too unnerving when Sylvester is playing alone or even in a duo setting; the long and haphazard octet numbers, on the other hand, are best exemplified by the album's title, Mayhem at Large. Do not say you were not warned.

While there is one rather familiar theme on offer, Thelonious Monk's "Well You Needn't" (Disc 2, track 2), its charming melody soon gives way to more free-form ad libbing by Sylvester who is joined on track 3 by trumpeter Waldron Mahdi Ricks and on track 4 by drummer Tony Moreno for basically more of the same.

The duo tracks on Disc 1 include vocalist Nora McCarthy, French hornist Vincent Chancey, tubaist Jose Davila, pianist Kuba Chichocki and guitarist Marvin Sewell, each one a proud flag-bearer for jazz that recognizes few melodic, harmonic or rhythmic canons or boundaries.

While this is not quite mayhem (there is presumably a method behind what may seem on the surface to be disarray and randomness), neither is this the breed of jazz whose charm, such as it is, would draw any more than a niche audience. Please keep in mind that this is but one opinion, one that comes from a standpoint that critic has long been wedded to more conventional straight-ahead jazz. To put it another way, there may be more here than piques some ears.