Matt Mitchell: Oblong Aplomb

On Oblong Aplomb pianist Matt Mitchell pays homage to the drummers in his life. In a way, it can be seen as a follow-up to his debut Fiction (Pi Recordings, 2013). That album, a duet with stickman Ches Smith, originated from Mitchell's practice of warming up for gigs with Tim Berne's Snakeoil by running through a series of etudes he had written to warm up his pianistic muscles. Smith, a colleague in the band, began to play along and the duo was born. This time out, Smith returns for the second half of the double disc set, while Kate Gentile takes the drum stool on the first.

Mitchell may well subscribe to the same dictum as trumpeter Peter Evans: More is more. A maximalist in both performance and writing, his compositions can be fiendishly complex. Guitarist Miles Okazaki blogged about the months of woodshedding that he needed to internalize the pieces on Mitchell's Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi Recordings, 2019) which involved multiple streams of information. Even with just a drummer for company, Mitchell's closely plotted charts explore various challenges such as drastically different lines in each hand, devilishly interlocking figures, or constantly flexing time, in a variety of combinations and guises.

Of course, if anyone is equipped to make gripping music from such conundrums it is Mitchell. A preternaturally gifted pianist, he has been in demand ever since he hit the NYC scene, as attested by credits with a succession of leaders including Dave Douglas, Darius Jones, Mario Pavone, Anna Webber, John Hollenbeck and Steve Coleman. With regard to his own leadership dates, Okazaki recounts that, in some places, Mitchell was actually playing three staves, using his thumbs in the middle as a kind of third hand.

Luckily both drummers are well aware of the pianist's predilections, Smith through that joint tenure in Snakeoil and Gentile as a regular partner in each other's groups, not least the collaborative outfit Snark Horse whose eponymous release totals six CDs worth of music. Each session was recorded over two days, suggesting an opportunity for the drummers to obtain at least some prior knowledge of the scores. Anticipatory drum fills by Gentile on the hyperspeed stop-start of "escalatory chicanery" and syncopated dash on "covertly overt" certainly suggest familiarity.

Mitchell does not privilege melody or meter, though both appear in attenuated bursts amid the dense tangles and unexpected nagging phrases. Out of twenty four tracks, the nearest the program comes to a foot tapper is the jittery groove of "chiasma." There is a mischievous quality to the set overall, as if the musicians are enjoying the complexity for its own sake. But the upshot is a fantastically kaleidoscopic exhibition full of ideas which few others could pull off. Even among the razzle dazzle here, "slarm biffle," the longest cut at over 13-minutes, is a tour de force of cascading interlocking textures.

Both drummers work hand in glove with Mitchell. Like the pianist, Gentile fragments the beat. Her stuttering, chattering accompaniment colors, accents and emphasizes. With her in tandem, the pace rarely lets up. Although Smith seems more invested in pulse than micro detail, he matches every twist and feint by Mitchell on numbers such as the flexibly speeded "the amused." However, at other times his responses sound more loosely aligned, especially when he turns to the vibraphone on some of the slower sparser pieces such as "doleful" and "ingenuous." In a program with no unaccompanied passages, the closest either drummer gets to a solo comes when Mitchell snags on a repeated pattern, as on "baleful" where Smith takes tumultuous advantage.

In spite of the bulk of the selections lasting between four and six minutes, each piece stands as a world in itself, with a myriad of concurrent, juxtaposed, and interlinked activity. With such rich sustenance, perhaps the best way to appreciate the assembled delights is to sample them one track at a time. But whichever way, this is an outstanding effort which should be heard.

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