Nicola Miller’s Living Things: Spit!

On the street, they would say that maritime Nova Scotia's rogue saxophonist Nicola Miller's rhizome-like way with her quintet, Living Things, or her prog jazz as a concept, is "some crazy sh*#!." But it need be said nicer at a global concern like All About Jazz. For as gentlemen and even gentler ladies, we are sworn to public service and to call a spade a spade.

So Spit! is a spade. Hands down. Why? Well, the crickety landslide created by drummer Nick Fraser that "Drummers Are Bad"  wrestles through with a buoyant sorrow that only the bayou knows is one damn good reason. The oddly serpentine but no less madly perfect bouncy-house title track—a victorious romp that kicks in with a solo by bassist Nicholas D'Amato (a freewheeling thinker that even Charles Mingus would want to sit in with). And before our attention falls prey to lesser, shinier things, it is also the track upon which trombonist Doug Tielli sows wildly his oats.

Then there is the first of three collective assaults on whatever reality reveals itself to be, and thus the titled "Telecommunications I." Back where some of us come from, we had a phrase for things like "Telecommunications I"—"Go figure."  "Go figure," we would say, whether asked or not. Being a chip off the old block, "Telecommunications II" moans and groans but dances, in the season's finale, into the funny energy that fuels the aptly dubbed "Telecommunications III. Miller is a thinker's thinker: one who ponders but never loses humor. And that goes a long, long way toward inspiring the soon-to-go-rogue Fraser to somehow contain the mano-a-mano she and just-as-strong-willed bass clarinetist Frank Gratkowski trade ways with on rather quirky "Where's The Line."

One who never loses humor loses hope, so Miller holds Spit!—her second all-out rally with the boys in Living Things—to a slippery slope. Miller openly invites her mates: D'Amato, Fraser, Gratkowski, and Tielli, to pick their own peak and mind the fall. A collaborator by design, Spit! bears Miller's adventurous stamp, but it fades into the collective like a charlatan's ruse: punky, yet ruminative. Smart, not obtuse. Loose, but not too much. Spit! rocks, we used to say.