DownBeat Magazine, January, 1998
Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black
One Great Day...
hatOLOGY 502
****1/2
What is there to love about this band? So much, starting simply with the sound of
Eskelin's tenor-he's mastered a fluttery, breathy delivery that looks back through
Archie Shepp and Ben Webster (Eskelin has said that neither of them are conscious
references), but with a harder edge to it. His unaccompanied solo in "Side Effects" gives a
tour of his playing, rolling together split tones, other multiphonics, honks, whispers,
muting, bent slurs and straight tones. A version of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's "The Inflated Tear", shows how confidently he handles tenderness: The middle of the cut opens
up into a static, held accordion drone and seed-pod/shell/bowed-cymbal percussion,
while the leader softly explores a few singing overtones, Here, the tear isn't just
inflated, it's zoomed in on like a driblet of water under a macro lens.
But what's remarkable about this project goes much deeper than Eskelin's playing he's
come up with a startlingly new concept, a new approach to structuring jazz work and
stimulating improvisations, and with these sidekicks he's got the goods to carry
it off. Recorded live in Wuppertal, Germany, in '96, One Great Day...
builds on the foundation Eskelin established on the trio's '95 debut, Jazz Trash
(Songlines). Where the playing has flashes of free music's organicism, the sectional
compositions are blocked together in highly constructed ways never merely conventional with
bold, often shocking shifts in texture, dynamic and style. Parkins is key, her sampler sometimes changing into a cool jazz organ or a church organ. sometimes laying
a walking bass, elsewhere metamorphosing into a stately piano (she uses her widest
array of samples yet on "T64K37B", and her accordion at times interrupts a flow with
held tones or creatively garbled clusters.
Eskelin's jump cutting isn't strictly genre based, like John Zorn's. In the six original
compositions on this record, he passes through (and grafts together) numerous different
musical zones, but the trip through them never feels generic. He gives dimension to each music references (or invented), and doesn't get hung up on name-dropping
musics if it suits the purpose, he'll use it. And when he composes melodies, like
the circuitous, swaggering line of "Vertical Hold" and the mysterious one on "Fallen
Angel", they're memorable, even fun.
Eskelin is one of the few folks today who's truly searching in music without entrenched
bias or political axes to grind. The day we can say that about more players will
indeed be a great one. (Three cheers, too, to the Swiss hat ART label for having
ditched the wasteful, ugly jewel box packaging concept for a thinner, sexier design.)
John Corbett
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