Music Monday: Big, Tonal Austere, and Classic

I spent time on flights over the last week and this gave me a chance to catch up on some listening (and some reading, finally!). 

I’m pretty excited to share this first album because I know nothing about this outfit and picked the album effectively at random. The band is called the Ancient Infinity Orchestra and the album is called River of Light.

It is a large, community-based ensemble from Leeds in North England. This album sounds contemporary, but evokes the age of 1970s big bands which sound to combine the future with a spiritual awareness of the past. They do this without exotic or electronic instruments and with only occasional (and generally inoffensive) use of “African” or “Asian” clichés. In fact, when they do occur they’re so noticeable to almost be charming. The final track, “Pharoah Sings” is a pleasant tribute to Pharoah Sanders and the other spiritual jazz pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a fine way to end the album, but it doesn’t reflect the quality of music across the entire release.  

Their label, Gondwana Records, shared the entire album here: 

I’ve also been trying to sample Tzadik Records catalogue which was recently released to streaming. On my flights, I listened to Wadada Leo Smith’s album Golden Quartet which came out in 2020. This particular version of Smith’s quartet included Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Davis (the pianist, not the basketball player), and Malachi Favors on bass.

Wadada Leo Smith albums fall into two categories for me. In some, he draws heavily on Miles Davis for inspiration. In others, he invests so heavily in a kind of spacious and ethereal sound, that I find his musicality difficult to grasp. With DeJohnette and Favors on this album, he manages to thread the needle. It’s not Smith as Davis nor it is a kind of austere, spatially disassociated sound. Instead, this album offers a more compelling alternative that shows off Smith’s incredible sensitivity for tone and his ability to manage space without becoming an exercise in either of those things.

Check it out here. 

Finally, for some reason, I got drawn to Kenny Burrell’s Introducing Kenny Burrell: The First Blue Note Sessions. This is compilation album drawn from three of Burrell’s 1956 releases and features (on most of the tracks) Tommy Flanagan on piano. Burrell and Flanagan are great together.