Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

"The times they are a-changin.'" Bob Dylan said that in 1964. He was right. In 2025, they are still changing, perhaps most notably with the emergence of artificial intelligence. That previously slow creep—outlined so accurately in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, paired with Stanely Kubrick's movie of the same name—will build to a tipping point leading to an implosion. The takeover is inevitable. The only way to address it is through the arts. This is what saxophonist-composer Jon Irabagon does with Server Farm.

Irabagon has plowed an extensive leader-co-leader path since his on-record debut, 2005's Mostly Other People Do the Killing (Hot Cup), followed by his leader debut, Jon Irabagon's Outright! (Innova, 2008). He is a free jazz madman who goes about as far out there as it gets with his saxophone. As a sideman—with the likes of trumpeters Dave Douglas and Chad McCullough, guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Moppa Elliott—he lifts the ensemble sound with his raw energy and unpredictability.

Now he channels the experiences of his busy recording history and past collaborations into fearless explorations of the emergence and evolution of AI.

On one level, it is an unsettling listening experience. On another, there is beauty in the combination of all-star players mixing up a strange brew of music to address the coming of what could turn into a quiet apocalypse.

Server Farm is Electric (note the capital letter E). It sounds like something of an update of the Miles Davis- Teo Macero collaborations that resulted in Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). There are wall-shaking cacophonies and dark interludes of foreboding motifs woven together by Irabagon's sax, a pair of electric guitars (Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg) and Peter Evans' terrorizing trumpet. Mazz Swift's violin peeks through the thick curtains of noise from time to time, Matt Mitchell plays the keyboards and a pair of bassists, Michael Formanek and Chris Lightcap, construct shifting foundations beside drummer Dan Weiss.

A server farm—for those unaware of this gathering menace—is a collection of servers housed and working together to enhance their productivity and efficiency and power. A web search on the subject is frightening, as is a good deal of Irabagon's Server Farm. There is a feeling that, eventually, something has got to give with this immense gathering of information in humming, wall-spanning electro- behemoths that are in the process of building the formerly slow creep of AI into a sudden onslaught. Irabagon portrays this feeling adeptly.

Going back to Dylan: In 1993 he released World Gone Wrong (Columbia Records). The album opened with the title tune, borrowed from the Mississippi Sheiks, a country-blues group active in the 1930s. The opening lyric: "Strange things are happening, like never before." The Sheiks and Dylan were onto something. And now, Irabagon latches onto this theme and takes it for a wild ride with his Server Farm.

While much of the music is calamitous, the disc wraps up with what seems, initially, like the arrival of the dystopia with the tune "Spy." The worst and maybe the inevitable has happened. The band creates a drifting dreamscape, and violinist-vocalist Swift recites Irabagon's prescient poem. About a drone disguised as a bumblebee. Then the madness breaks out.

Scary stuff.

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