Listeners who know Jamie Saft primarily for his work on Tzadik probably think of him as a jazz pianist, if one with an interest in noise and Jewish culture (making the label a good home for him). It's not a bad profile, but it might miss how deeply the multi-instrumentalist's love for a breadth of musical forms runs. Trouble, his record of arrangements of Bob Dylan songs for piano trio, is far from schtick but rather born of a love for the singer's melodies, an aspect of Dylan's music rarely isolated against his famed lyrics. And his Black Shabbis isn't an arched-brown take on heavy rock but an informed and unusual reading on the spiritual in black metal. In other words, Saft doesn't deal in irony, even though the foundations of Downtown music have often had more to do with cheeky (if loving) mockery of popular genres than equal opportunity absorption and regurgitation.
In recent years, Saft has found another career writing scores for film, and the incidental music collected on A Bag of Shells shows the diversity of his interests — maybe even a little too much so. The 16 tracks are culled from four very different films. Eighty seconds of pounding guitar riffs open the disc, the title theme from Murderball (the best known of the films here). On this and the three other tracks from that documentary, Saft plays the bulk of the instruments (guitar, bass, organ, mellotron, Fender Rhodes Wirlitzer, piano, synthesizer and percussion) with drummer Dmitry Shnaydman (who played on Black Shabbis and Masada cellist Erik Friedlander making cameos. Along with the opener are a rockish instrumental ballad, an organ pulse track and a dubby percussion cue. For the film God Grew Tired of Us Saft called on a pair of Tzadik regulars, percussionist Cyro Baptista and bassist Shaniz Ezra Blumenkranz, the latter playing a mean oud on two of the three tracks, and added Yacouba Sissoko's kora to one along with his own bass and organ. These short pieces have a nice bit bit of exotica to them, fitting the Sudanese subject matter of the film, and are probably the most evocative in the collection.
His score for Dear Talula takes up a full half the disc, and may be the biggest surprise here. The composer carries most of the weight here with his array of keyboards, guitars and percussion, with Bobby Previte adding drums to two tracks and Bill McHenry's saxophone on one. The eight cuts veer surprisingly close to smooth jazz. Acoustic instruments and light melodies dominate, if such a word as "dominate" can be applied to music that seems to hover between Mike Oldfield and mid period Pink Floyd. They're nice little tracks, if the least compelling here. The album closes with a single track for the film Brooklyn Exile, which bookends nicely with the Murderball theme. Bringing back Shnaydman's drums and adding Vin Cin on bass, it's a fun and funny sort of soft-hardcore Tzadik jazz exploration, and nicely displays Saft's piano chops in its two and a half minutes.
If the impression is given here that the disc is something of a hodgepodge, that's only because it is, made all the more so by the strange decision to intersperse the tracks from the different projects, so that rather than four quadrants it's something of a blunderbuss. Of course, that can easily be remedied by re-sequencing in iTunes, but the collection comes off as a bit of a display of proficiency. Or a resume — albeit an impressive one.
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