Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Artificial Intelligence would have a hard job pinning down saxophonist Jon Irabagon's defining characteristics. When a player is as talented as Irabagon, who can turn his hand to almost any style, sometimes the challenge is to find a focus that stimulates. On Server Farm, Irabagon has taken the notion of AI and the ever increasing prevalence of the digital world as his casus belli. Not that he uses AI himself in composing the album, rather as the PR reveals, he emulates its output by sifting through his bandmates' discographies to identify typical elements from their expression which he can weave into his own material.

Irabagon addresses a dystopian future with a suitably overloaded palette. Not only does he supplement his quartet, comprising pianist Matt Mitchell, electric bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dan Weiss, with a further six players, but he also enlists post production techniques to further thicken the aural brew. Consequently, the five multi-part pieces boast huge density of detail, as themes vie with intersecting layers, swirling polyphony, surging beats, and pithy cameos. Irabagon's crew includes some of NYC's most wily operators, the sort for whom his complex forms hold no fears whatsoever.

"Colocation" begins with Levy Lorenzo's kulintang (a set of tuned Phillipines gongs) setting out a dancing introduction before toggling between dislocated drive, seesawing horns and glitchy crackles. Only Mitchell's Fender Rhodes gets an extended run, though Peter Evans' puckish trumpet can be heard in a sort of big band dialogue. It is clear from the start that Irabagon is thinking in orchestral terms, wielding the twin guitars of Wendy Eisenberg and Miles Okazaki, the violin of Mazz Swift and the acoustic bass of Michael Formanek in ways to further his edgy madcap vision.

Irabagon himself is the prime soloist, particularly on the doomy lurch of "Graceful Exit," where lush Ellingtonian textures become progressively subverted by electronic asides, and on the scratchy pointillist staccato of "Routers." On this latter cut, the leader's disjointed squawks and echoing phrases are the result of an overdubbed solo which he then fed through various effects pedals, chopped up and flipped over the steadily escalating impetus. Evans also stands out, cutting through in a mercurial duet with one of the guitars at the outset of "Singularities," before another careening offkilter tenor outburst from the leader.

On the final "Spy," over an uneasy morass, Swift sings a poem written by Irabagon which perceives a bumblebee as a surveillance drone. As instrumental discontinuities, juxtapositions, and disembodied mutters percolate up around the voice, Irabagon's sopranino skirls deep in the mix, alongside a further recitation, and a fugue-like passage for violin, saxophone and trumpet.

Expressing himself through the medium of the ensemble, Irabagon mines an uncertain outlook for adventurous answers.

Comments