Search - Michael Blake :: Drift

Is There Such a Thing as Noir Jazz?

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 11/17/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There is if you're Michael Blake. After the audacious Kingdom of Champa, I wondered if Blake was a one-trick pony. Yeah, Champa was pretty remarkable, but what was he going to do for an encore? Champa, with its suite-like, song-cycle-ish structure, seemed unrepeatable. And Blake has wisely chosen a different approach, although something similar is going on at the heart of this music. Both seem rooted in the land--Champa in Southeast Asia, Drift in the American West. The cover photo, dry and dusty as Kayenta, Arizona, gives the game away, as does the neo-Duane Eddy guitar of Tony Scheer on the title cut. But there's lots of other weird junk going on--for example, check out the North- Africa-meets-Bali vibe of Mean as a Swan (great title), and the Malian sensibility of Toque, which drifts into controled chaos as it fades into oblivion. The Creep is a bit of whacked-out Ellingtonia whose tangoesque bridge is especially appealing. Lady in Red is neo-hip lounge music, played pretty straight-ahead, so much so, in fact, that its sly sensibility only begins to peak through in Blake's fine tenor solo. Teo Walks starts out like Island music on uppers, achieves a wicked groove, then becomes a vehicle for some mean blowing. The 11 1/2 minute Duty Free Suite is the most ambitious cut here. It begins with a slow section, recalling the opening of Drift, moves into a rolicking romp, slows down again, then finishes off with a Steely Dan-like bloozy grove. With Dry Socket we're firmly back in the West, tipped off by the deep twang of Tony Sheer's guitar, but a West that John Wayne would have a hard time recognizing with its boozy edginess. Afro Blake sounds like LA meets Nigeria. The Coleman Hawkins tune Maria, the only non-Blake composition on the cd, manages to preserves a Hawkins-like sensibility while sounding utterly modern, gorgeous, and nothing at all like Hawkins. Here and in Lady in Red, the Noir thing really comes to the fore. More drop-dead gorgeous playing shines through Residence, along with a bunch of mysterioso ambient background sounds (is that a zither I hear?).This music has definite affinites with Ben Allison's Medicine Wheel--indeed, Allison handles bass duties--in its unabashed modernism, its hip ecclecticism, its moments of utter beauty arising out of the most unlikely musical situations.I gotta admit, it took me a little while to warm up to this music, but since I've gotten onto its aesthetic, I can't keep it out of my cd player. Unless something absolutely spectacular comes out in the next month and a half, this is my album of the year."