As new releases by Branford Marsalis and Marty Ehrlich demonstrate, the idea of commissioning jazz artists to make music about painting is certainly in the air at the moment. True, jazz and the jazz life were a major theme for Romare Bearden, the subject of Marsalis' Romare Bearden Revealed, and Ehrlich's "The Long View" grew out of a collaboration with visual artist Oliver Jackson to create a memorial to their friend Julius Hemphill. But the cynic in me suspects that marketing (using the borrowed interest in one art form to attract fans of the other) and not aesthetics may be at the root.
Chasing Paint is the product of a Doris Duke/Chamber Music America commission inspired by the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Soprano saxophonist Bloom is no stranger to unusual commissions (one from NASA resulted in the bracing, if unlikely, "Art and Aviation"), but
hers is not the first music that Pollock's form of abstract expressionism might suggest (Cecil Taylor or Ornette anyone?).
Still, Bloom is a formidable improviser and the rhythm section of pianist Fred Hersch, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Bobby Previte pretty much recommends itself. The pianist's work as a leader, lovely though it may be, sometimes wanders into a daydream of lyricism. Working as an accompanist sharpens his focus and lets him use his big ears, as he does in gleefully chasing Bloom up and down the scale on the title cut an on the concluding "White Light," (the title of the Pollock painting on the cover of Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz").
Not that Hersch's lyricism is absent. Instead, he clothes it less in Bill Evans pastels than in Second Viennese School formal wear (on "Reflections of the Big Dipper") or tumbling, boppish lines ("On Seeing JP"). On the title cut, Hersch creates a little wavelet notes in one hand, then another with the other hand, setting them in motion to intersect and subside. The effect may be more Victor Vasarely than Pollock, but it's lovely nonetheless.
Hersch and Bloom make an apt pair; at heart, she's a lyricist too, with a tone like ginger ale: bubbling but dry in the lower register, but with a sweet finish on top, able to jump registers with the smooth glide of a theremin.
This should prove deadly on the unaccompanied reading of Richard Rodgers' "The Sweetest Sounds" the only cover tune on the program. Instead, Bloom finds the sadness so often at the core of Rodgers' great minor-key melodies. On the couple of occasions where she uses a pitch-tracking effect, her taste and imagination are beyond reproach.
Dresser and Previte are everything you could ask for in a rhythm pair, and the recording and production are up to the lofty intent of this project. Arabesque has a sort of dual personality as a concert music and jazz label. "Chasing Paint" reaches across that divide. It's chamber music made by musicians of intellect and commitment, able to stand on its own merits with or without Jackson Pollock.
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