 |
| High Flavors |
On paper, guitarist/composer Max Kutner’s High Flavors looks like a jazz album. The eight tracks are of expected jazz lengths, between three and seven minutes. The instrumentation of trumpet, tenor sax, electric guitar, electric bass, and drums seems to place us firmly in contemporary jazz territory. Yet Kutner’s specific approach both as a player and composer places his music in a genre of its own, somewhere slightly outside jazz. The ingredients of jazz are all there, but put together in a unique combination that sounds like no jazz you’ve ever heard before. With additional influences of prog, noise rock, and post-minimalism, Kutner and his quintet create something unabashedly quirky and consistently fascinating.
Kutner, trumpeter Eli Asher, saxophonist Michael Eaton, bassist Kurt Kotheimer, and drummer Colin Hinton form a very tight band that rides sure-footedly through all the prickly complications of the leader’s writing. High Flavors is an adventure of an album. Each track is very different, though tied together by their instrumentation and the meticulous (even mischievous) level of detail in Kutner’s compositions - particularly in the rhythmic vocabulary and development of thematic cells. A further unifying element is the relative lack of solos; with few exceptions, all the improvising is either collective or embedded in an otherwise written ensemble texture.
This is an album full of contrasts, as clearly illustrated in the opening track, “Deramping”. The clean, bright-toned unison loop at the beginning gives no indication that this piece will end in thundering lumps of noise. On all tracks, the horns (and to some extent the drums) lend a hard-bop sort of vibrance, often juxtaposed aggressively with the rock-esque guitar and bass. “A High Point Of Low Culture” feels especially like jazz that’s been taken apart and reassembled differently. It’s an atonal swinger with mashed-up spoken-word samples introduced as an extra melody instrument. “Infinity Has No Center” is a quartet improv with no trumpet; it begins as a simple, subdued meditation and evolves into an angular tangle of interlocking lines.
In “In Want Of An Interpolative Escape Machine”, a joyous mixed-meter theme leads to an extended free section in which Kutner’s rumbling, crackling distortion takes over, threatening to smother the return of the ensemble at the end but never fully obliterating the festivities. The through-composed “Struggling Sometimes” is well named: its harmonic progression always seems to be on the way somewhere, never quite resolving. Like the first two tracks, “Flavors Hook Kids” explores the contrast between jazz and not-quite-jazz. The modal windiness of the horn voicings, as well as the glockenspiel sample at the beginning, give this one almost a “West Coast cool” sound - a style ripe for subverting.
The second completely improvised track, “Towers Collapsing” is as far from the written pieces as possible. It’s a three-minute chunk of absurd, noisy rubble, with Asher whistling wildly through his mouthpiece at the beginning. Frantic and fragmented, it feels much longer than it is. The final piece, “Less A Moral Lesson”, is the album’s longest. The written material is dominated by constantly shifting rhythmic cycles and slippery, raga-like unison lines. As with some of the others, this one is largely atonal with no easy harmonic handles to grasp. The ghostly atmospheric drone which runs through the middle (including Hinton’s otherwise solo improv) amplifies this piece’s disorienting strangeness.
High Flavors is a fitting title for this album: these are no basic flavors. With so much going on in this music, each track is worth multiple listens for the aural tastebuds to fully appreciate. If you really sink your teeth into it, you may discover new flavor profiles every time. It may be an acquired taste, but if you’ve acquired it you’ll recognize this album as a next-level flavor sensation.
Kutner, trumpeter Eli Asher, saxophonist Michael Eaton, bassist Kurt Kotheimer, and drummer Colin Hinton form a very tight band that rides sure-footedly through all the prickly complications of the leader’s writing. High Flavors is an adventure of an album. Each track is very different, though tied together by their instrumentation and the meticulous (even mischievous) level of detail in Kutner’s compositions - particularly in the rhythmic vocabulary and development of thematic cells. A further unifying element is the relative lack of solos; with few exceptions, all the improvising is either collective or embedded in an otherwise written ensemble texture.
This is an album full of contrasts, as clearly illustrated in the opening track, “Deramping”. The clean, bright-toned unison loop at the beginning gives no indication that this piece will end in thundering lumps of noise. On all tracks, the horns (and to some extent the drums) lend a hard-bop sort of vibrance, often juxtaposed aggressively with the rock-esque guitar and bass. “A High Point Of Low Culture” feels especially like jazz that’s been taken apart and reassembled differently. It’s an atonal swinger with mashed-up spoken-word samples introduced as an extra melody instrument. “Infinity Has No Center” is a quartet improv with no trumpet; it begins as a simple, subdued meditation and evolves into an angular tangle of interlocking lines.
In “In Want Of An Interpolative Escape Machine”, a joyous mixed-meter theme leads to an extended free section in which Kutner’s rumbling, crackling distortion takes over, threatening to smother the return of the ensemble at the end but never fully obliterating the festivities. The through-composed “Struggling Sometimes” is well named: its harmonic progression always seems to be on the way somewhere, never quite resolving. Like the first two tracks, “Flavors Hook Kids” explores the contrast between jazz and not-quite-jazz. The modal windiness of the horn voicings, as well as the glockenspiel sample at the beginning, give this one almost a “West Coast cool” sound - a style ripe for subverting.
The second completely improvised track, “Towers Collapsing” is as far from the written pieces as possible. It’s a three-minute chunk of absurd, noisy rubble, with Asher whistling wildly through his mouthpiece at the beginning. Frantic and fragmented, it feels much longer than it is. The final piece, “Less A Moral Lesson”, is the album’s longest. The written material is dominated by constantly shifting rhythmic cycles and slippery, raga-like unison lines. As with some of the others, this one is largely atonal with no easy harmonic handles to grasp. The ghostly atmospheric drone which runs through the middle (including Hinton’s otherwise solo improv) amplifies this piece’s disorienting strangeness.
High Flavors is a fitting title for this album: these are no basic flavors. With so much going on in this music, each track is worth multiple listens for the aural tastebuds to fully appreciate. If you really sink your teeth into it, you may discover new flavor profiles every time. It may be an acquired taste, but if you’ve acquired it you’ll recognize this album as a next-level flavor sensation.
