Apparitions

An artistic milestone of New York ‘downtown’ creative jazz with an avant-garde edge, recorded in crystal-clear DSD.
– Mark Werlin

New York saxophonist Tony Malaby’s Mexican-American background and experience playing both inside and outside bring a subtly different flavor to his second record as leader. The members of the band worked with his structural concepts more than with written-out compositions: “I decided to try to create platforms for my favorite ‘zones’ that we’d developed or would hit on. So for example, a multi-layered zone where the four of us are each playing in our own pulse or dimension in time, or a very transparent zone where it’s cymbals/mallets/brushes and I’m playing flute-like and Drew Gress is playing arco. And the question is: how am I going to get this into a composition, how am I going to structure it?”

Throughout Apparitions, freedom and form are dual aspects of the music’s evolution. Cutting-edge jazz typically blurs the distinction between composition and improvisation, but seldom are the results so intuitive yet coherent — sinuous group elaborations of uncanny dexterity, the often dense textures retaining a striking clarity. The whole record feels like one extended suite exploring forms and moods on some knife-edge between passion and abstraction. “A big part of the aesthetic is that the composition is hidden, and the improv is equally hidden… Tom Rainey, Mike Sarin and Drew are masters at creating this effect, because they can absorb the material very quickly and are then able to abstract it and deconstruct it, they create another layer over the written material, even as they perform it… On ‘Talpa’ and ‘Jersey Merge’ there’s a structure that we’re blowing off of, chord changes — ‘Jersey Merge’ is based on the harmonic structure of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ — and I knew that I’d get a different type of music from the rest of the record if I incorporated a couple of tunes with form and structure. The way they mask that there is a form there is brilliant, it creates a seamlessness that never constricts me as an improviser.”

Timbral innovation is another area of investigation, “trying to create the illusion that I’m not playing saxophone, that I’m playing marimba or other percussion-like instruments… trying to make the ensemble sound bigger than it really is.” Evoking cultural and natural space is also an important consideration: “I use a lot of imagery or visualization, and at the time of making Apparitions I was dealing a lot with my heritage, so a lot of imagery of adobe, weavings, chilis, cilantro, spices, the ancient pyramids of Mexico… these were on my mind. And there’s a primitiveness in the music — ‘Tula’ at times sounds like I’m blowing into a conch shell… Something I’ve always carried with me from the southwest is a sense of space. It’s very easy for me to create density and energy but I’m working on spacing that out, pacing myself, and thinking of ‘arcs’ differently, I don’t want things to always start soft, crescendo to a peak, and come down at the end.”

Tony Malaby, tenor & soprano saxophone
Tom Rainey, drums
Drew Gress, double bass
Michael Sarin, drums & percussion

Recorded to DSD October 8, 2002 at Systems Two, Brooklyn. Mixed to 5.0 & mastered in Pyramix by Graemme Brown, Zen Mastering, Vancouver.