Vanguard jazz drummer Whit Dickey inaugurated his TAO Forms label in 2020 with the release of pianist Matthew Shipp's Piano Equation. Since then he's been industrious: He released the pianist's seminal Codebreaker, as well as curating titles by saxophonists James Brandon Lewis and Ivo Perelman, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, drummers Tani Tabbal and Michael Bisio, and a complement of his own recordings. The latter include the trio dates Village Mothership and Expanding Light. Astral Long Form: Staircase in Space, an earlier ...
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Vanguard jazz drummer Whit Dickey inaugurated his TAO Forms label in 2020 with the release of pianist Matthew Shipp's Piano Equation. Since then he's been industrious: He released the pianist's seminal Codebreaker, as well as curating titles by saxophonists James Brandon Lewis and Ivo Perelman, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, drummers Tani Tabbal and Michael Bisio, and a complement of his own recordings. The latter include the trio dates Village Mothership and Expanding Light. Astral Long Form: Staircase in Space, an earlier quartet offering, was released one day before this session was recorded. Dickey's companions here include Shipp and bassist Brandon Lopez (both regulars), and master saxophonist Tony Malaby in his first collaboration with the drummer. In his liner essay, Dickey claims that he conceived this recording 15 years ago after catching a "vibration" while repeatedly listening to John Coltrane's Crescent and A Love Supreme. It sounds like neither album.These four long selections showcase a band in the process of becoming. Their inspired individual parts become spokes in a wheel of musical mantra, and their spiritually attuned language is created in common, using dialogue, space, texture, and dynamic as communicative utterances. "Supernova" commences with Malaby playing an angular blues. Shipp adds elegant middle-register chords atop syncopated crash cymbals and tom-toms and a spiky bassline. As these fragments gel into inquiries and then statements, the piece gathers in intensity via Shipp's circular, extrapolative modal chords. Malaby's playing is wooly, offering brute force as the trace of an inner, rough-hewn lyricism. In "Doomsday Equation," Shipp explores a circular vamp in a distinctly rhythmic cadence as Lopez and Dickey provide feints, pulses, and drones before Malaby responds directly to Shipp. In the saxophonist's solo, he quotes from New Orleans R&B ("Hey Pocky A-Way"), Christmas songs ("Jingle Bells"), and "A Love Supreme." He tunnels under the harmony to extract tonal resonances with power and purpose as the band offer loosely articulated, rhythmically interlocking phrases. "Swamp Petals" commences with intimate conversation between saxophone and piano as they emerge from blues. The former begins articulating a serpentine improvisation, while the latter offers a lower-middle-register response. Dickey and Lopez color the margins in elastic rhythms. Eventually, the frontline players circle around a rumbling modal theme, break it down to essences, and reconstruct it with divergent tonal statements before Lopez delivers a moaning, multiphonic arco solo. "Starship Lotus" is uptempo and frenetic. Shipp and Malaby play semi-lyric rounds underscored by kick drums, ride cymbals, and arco bass. Shipp erects a post-bop pulse that Lopez and Malaby embellish with repetition, as Dickey frames the band with emphatic accents amid dynamic flow. On Root Perspectives, the interplay between Malaby and Shipp is as instinctive as it is informative and incendiary. The sensitivity and focused power of the rhythm section adds not only actionable drama but balance, depth, heft, and a warm, welcoming textural dimension. This is an essential exercise in deeply attuned, spiritually adept music-making. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi
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