Ken Thomson: Sextet
New Focus Recordings

Sextet arrives in an oversized gatefold sleeve, one halfway between LP and CD formats. If such a gesture is intended to accentuate Ken Thomson's status as an artist different from others, it's hardly necessary: constitutionally, as a composer and conceptualist Thomson has stood apart for a while now, something Sextet soundly reaffirms.

The album's nominally jazz, but the term hardly does justice to what Thomson's up to here. His intricate charts are so rich in counterpoint and polyphony, they as much suggest a classical sensibility as jazz, and as if designed to emphasize the fact, the seven-track set begins with a treatment of Gyorgy Ligeti's Passacaglia Ungherese, the band in this case downplaying soloing for a close reading of the material. The move's significant: in selecting Ligeti's piece as a scene-setter, Thomson serves notice that the originals following will infuse the group's jazz-styled attack with the complexity and sophistication of contemporary classical writing. As a result, formal notation and improvisation become equally important facets of the music in contrast to both classical, where adherence to notated charts is emphasized, and jazz, where improvisation is foundational.

Such genre cross-pollination is nothing new for Thomson, by the way. As the clarinetist in the Bang on a Can All-Stars (Slow/Fast and Gutbucket, too), he regularly tackles contemporary classical works, and Thomson himself has written material for the JACK Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, and others. This is a man for whom operating at high altitudes where bold classical and jazz forms intermingle is nothing unusual.

He's certainly gathered an incredible set of musicians for the project, whose fifty-five minutes were laid down over two days at NYC's Flux Studios in January 2017. Thomson's complex charts demand high-velocity playing, and on Sextet, the leader augments his alto with tenor saxist Anna Webber, trumpeter Russ Johnson, and trombonist Alan Ferber, all four of them powered by the ever flexible Adam Armstrong on bass and Daniel Dor on drums (notable for its absence is piano). That four-horn front-line gives the Brooklyn-based Thomson much to work with in terms of contrapuntal lines and layering.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the sextet's rendering of Passacaglia Ungherese (aside from how well-attuned the players are to the the arrangement's intricacies) is how little seeming distance separates Ligeti's from the six by Thomson. Deprived of the knowledge that the chorale-styled opener isn't a Thomson original, one would presume it to be so, given how naturally it aligns with those that follow, especially when the plenitude of counterpoint, layering, and polyphony in that opener carries over into the other content (see the luscious, horns-only intro to the ten-minute “Resolve” in particular). Armstrong and Dor don't appear in the Ligeti setting, however, and as a result the tone of the release changes when their agile rhythmning joins the rest in “Misery is the New Hope”; another key shift occurs, too, in the addition of soloing to the presentation, even if it's judiciously incorporated when the composition dedicates so much time to formal notation. That said, Thomson and Johnson thread robust solos into the framework, their turns emboldened by the considerable heat generated around them.

One's ears perk up when “Icebreaker” opens with rapid-fire unison lines by Thomson and Webber, their roller-coaster trajectories first egged on by claps and then the full band. In the solo department, Ferber soars this time out, though you'll probably more remember the incredible energy of the coda when the tune's over. The lines between classical and jazz also blur during “Helpless” when solos by Johnson are backed by a fluttering series of cyclical, minimalism-styled patterns voiced by the other horns.

October 2018