Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness
Sextet
Reva Information, 2025
Isaiah J. Thompson
The Guide of Isaiah: Fashionable Jazz Ministry
Mack Avenue, 2025
I had a dialogue with a buddy on private responses to the mess we’re in politically. She was fully depressed by the information and I responded, “Properly, you’ve nonetheless acquired to take pleasure in your life.” This acquired me pondering: does engagement with a trigger, a robust want to guard what we worth, preclude atypical paths to happiness? If we will see that the American model of fascism is on the rise, can we nonetheless, just like the village inhabitants in The Zone of Curiosity, have a tendency our gardens, inured to the realities taking root round us?
But I nonetheless discover myself in search of magnificence, as a marvel and as a balm, as a result of the seek for magnificence can also be a seek for which means. Our regard for what we love, our coming again to it, is its personal form of pushback towards the unharnessed energy directives of the state. Inventive statements are themselves statements of being, of will, of solidity, and of remaining rooted; as Walt Whitman writes in his monumental ode to the person amongst many, “Track of Myself,” “My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite.”
An allied response is a seek for non secular repose in a world of confusion. With the information coming at us full velocity every day, fractious and invasive, do now we have any sacred area wherein to dwell? Two current recordings, by the ensemble Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness and by pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, interact in musical explorations of this query, newly imagining how conventional types of worship can merge with ever-evolving musical practices.
Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness is comprised of a bunch of affiliated musicians led by saxophonist Tony Jones and violinist Charlie Burnham. Since debuting in 2011, they’ve hosted numerous collaborators, and for his or her newest recording, Sextet (Reva Information), they’ve expanded to incorporate unique drummer Kenny Wollesen, in addition to newer additions cellist Marika Hughes, bassist Rashaan Carter, and second saxophonist Jessica Jones. The recording makes open-hearted forays into non secular issues, beginning with the opening reduce, “I Shall Not Need.” It recasts the continuously memorized and recited Lord’s Prayer, starting “The Lord is my shepherd.” Burnham engages the lyric together with his pleading cry of a voice, remodeling it from a ritualized recitation to a passionate cri de coeur. Elsewhere, there are Jewish melodies, Buddhist creation tales, and a free method to kind. The band traffics within the surprising, whether or not in its melodic twists or its shifts of vitality, with Jones usually rising as a wizened voice within the fray. The band absorbs all method of influences, however finds a folk-inflected chamber jazz fashion of its personal.
Their identify expresses their vary, suggesting the best way they make use of musical idioms to interpret and embody kinds of consciousness, making that fundamental connection—music as a type of inquiry—extra express. These are statements of multiplicity. Their increase and collapsing of music kind by way of elliptical progressions feels natural, primarily based on belief. There may be a rare balancing of the six components, an innate respect for what it takes to finish the sound of the ensemble. They appear to know instinctively that the best way to data is reached by means of the open hand, not the closed fist.
One other sort of non secular journey takes place within the new recording by the pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, The Guide of Isaiah: Fashionable Jazz Ministry (Mack Avenue). A blazing younger presence, a 2018 finalist within the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Worldwide Piano Competitors, he’s brilliantly versed in jazz repertoire. Enjoying with a New Orleans-leaning ensemble—together with drummer Herlin Riley (who performs the tambourine on the album) and bassist Marty Jaffe—Thompson digs right into a reduce within the declaratory fashion of the non secular works of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, in addition to their acolyte Wynton Marsalis.
