Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Warning! Warning! Heads up! Spoiler alert! Server Farm has the potential to take your head to some random places. Some alarming (as all artists should be these days), Some cacophonous. Some claustrophobic. Others freeing, fleeting, fervent.

Server Farm, saxophonist/composer Jon Irabagon's heatedly precise and prescient head-on clash with the threat of AI blisters the binary codes and algorithms of the connected world (which makes us all individual heads of the Hydra) both surgically and haphazardly, letting it all and the collateral fall where it may. At the eye of this maelstrom, Irabagon's regular quartet—pianist/keyboardist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dan Weiss; are joined by violinist/vocalist Mazz Swift, trumpeter Peter Evans, guitarists Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg and acoustic bassist Michael Formanek and together make a whole of good noise in the grand attempt to wake us from our screen-locked stupor.

Take, for example, the completely unexpected "Graceful Exit." An elegant, slow-dance ballad ala the master himself —Duke Ellington —until it is not. Colliding within the throes of an onrushing digital storm, the track surges on victorious to swing once more. It all then gets swallowed up by the dark, electronic entreaties introducing "Spy," a lucid mash of spoken word (spoken warning), more Ellingtonia, and the free growls, scrapes, and dissonance provided by one and all. Irabagon and Evans sound especially like they have just dropped in from a full blow-out John Coltrane session for Ascension (Impulse!, 1966)

Emerging from the ancient tones of Lorenzo's kulintang, a traditional set of gongs from the Philippines, "Colocation" pummels into consciousness—shape-shifting, terra-forming, equal parts Carla Bley and Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1971) era Miles Davis—all within the opening thirteen minutes. "Routers" has rhythms akimbo, as each musician adds his/her data flow to the current. Weiss and Lightcap keep the track grounded and furthering forward. The fiery, fomenting "Singularities," a bursting-at-the-seams Irabagon composition with so many twists and turns it is near impossible to document, completes Server Farm's scorching indictment on our dependency (surrender?) to all that is shiny and digital.