Linda May Han Oh is a Malaysia-born, New York-based Australian bassist and composer who leads a piano-less trio on the album Strange Heavens. She composes all tracks except covers of Geri Allen and Melba Liston. Trio partners Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet) and Tyshawn Sorey (drums) produce spacious, inventive textures that emphasize minimalist interplay. Akinmusire alternates soft-blown ambience with urgent, Miles-inspired gestures, while Sorey supplies spacey rimshots and dynamic cymbal work. Highlights include Portal, the title track, Acapella, Paperbirds, Folk Song, Allen's Skin, and Liston's Just Waiting. The ensemble balances caressing pizzicato, dizzying top-end squeals, staccato hip-hopish rhythms, and free-jazz excursions.
The power of three has had a great press for a long time, embedded as it's been in the tenets of Christians, witches, Buddhists, or just the beginnings, middles and ends of fireside stories. And in the thrifty music-making years after the second world war, the economical appeal of the jazz trio often led by piano virtuosi such as Bill Evans or Ahmad Jamal, occasionally by such sax giants as Sonny Rollins also revealed just how much spontaneous creativity could fly from minimal gatherings.
Akinmusire, a master of soft-blown sonic ambience and Miles-inspired urgency, initially edges his way tremulously into Oh's racing bass hook on the opening Portal as if retracing distantly remembered paths with her (they first collaborated on Oh's 2009 trio-leadership debut, Entry), before hurtling into dizzying top-end squeals, skimming double-time lines, and half-valve note-bends. The title track's whispering, short-phrase melody blossoms amid Oh's caressing pizzicato and Sorey's spacey rimshots;
Acapella's delicately descending passages are embraced by bass flurries and hissing cymbals; and Akinmusire is in his most rhythmically Miles-inspired on the staccato, hip-hopish Noise Machinery. The guilelessly delicate Paperbirds is a highlight, as is the soaringly rhapsodic Folk Song. Allen's Skin is edgy, brittle and eventually free-jazzily wild, and Liston's meditative Just Waiting glows with the compelling tonal warmth of both Akinmusire's horn and Oh's sonorities.
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