Giuseppe Paradiso: Parallel Dimensions

Parallel Dimensions steers the listener's imagination through a luxurious multicultural tapestry woven in music by drummer, vocalist, composer, arranger and producer Giuseppe Paradiso and his sextet. It explores broad musical horizons that can sound radiantly bright or dark, often features several instrumental or melodic voices at the same time, and is strongly colored and shaped by African rhythms. Parallel Dimensions sort of sounds the way that the cover of Miles Davis' landmark Bitches Brew looks.

Two drum pieces propel the leader front and center. He builds up the power and volume of a basic rhythm across his tom-tom and bass drums until "Joriki" growls and grumbles like tribal thunder, with James Hazlewood-Dale rolling through bass notes so low they're more felt than heard and percussionist MALICK NGOM cutting through the thunder with lightning-quick cross-rhythms. Paradiso dedicates the set-ending "Tony" to the late Tony Allen, the Nigerian drummer and composer who served as drummer and musical director of Fela Kuti's band Africa '70 and helped found the groove-heavy Afrobeat style. Paradiso's stuttering yet solid shuffle rhythm opens up a reliable and smooth Idris Muhammad groove and later leads the percussion ensemble dancing into the closing fade. In between, after saxophone and guitar spotlights, the marimba solo lends flattering (funky) rhythmic, (cool) harmonic, and (soft) melodic touches. Throughout this entire set, but especially in these two tunes, you can hear Paradiso's experience playing drums for more than a decade in a Nigerian church. "It's very fun and enlightening to play in such a context, especially for a drummer, because you have to have a groove," he explains. "You have to combine your drumming with the dancing of the people in the congregation."

Utar Artun dramatically opens the scenic "Memories of the Future" with stark and dark solo piano that eventually warms into contemplative melancholy and pulls cello and then the other instruments into the melody. Mark Zaleski's howling saxophone eventually rises to the top like a spirit conjured by Artun's relentless, swirling and deep rhythms. The lovely melody of "It's Only the Beginning" sounds like a vocal song, especially with the doubling saxophone and guitar shining so brightly together, and seems to be the flipside to "Memories of the Future" (with the junket to "Joriki" in between).

The title track wanders yet moves purposefully through Zaleski's evocative saxophone song, and he blows through his alto with a ferocious attack and percussive sound. Likewise, Phil Sargent's electric guitar solo rages hard and hot before pinwheeling to rest back inside the melody.

In reflecting on the genesis of this music, Paradiso reveals a much larger truth: "I began composing the Parallel Dimensions album during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020," he recalls. "This album is an attempt to describe the different and parallel realities that each one of us experience even living the same event, at the same time and in the same place."