The thing you hear time and again about guitarist, composer and bandleader Miles Okazaki is the intelligence he brings to his work, and perhaps that’s to be expected from a Harvard, Manhattan School of Music and Julliard grad. But that heady stuff comes with an instinct for development and groove that can’t be taught, and for his sixth album The Sky Below Okazaki builds on his expanding craft in general and the narrative flow of Trickster in particular. This project retains Anthony Tidd (bass) and Sean Rickman (drums) from that prior, all-originals project, replacing only keyboardist Craig Taborn with Matt Mitchell.
Here’s an artist whose depth and breadth steadily increases while the overall approach to making an album hadn’t fundamentally changed; I observed in 2009 about Generations that “it’s a record that unfolds, ebbs and flows. And, it’s very much a group performance.” The same could be said about The Sky Below. For “Rise and Shine” Miles Okazaki charts some mighty gnarled lines for himself but those lines are deeply entwined into the melodic development. Rickman’s jittery rhythmic pattern adds a certain edge, and at the end, Okazaki doubles down and overdubs one darting lead on top of another.
There’s ingenuity to be found all over the record, and manifesting itself in all kinds of ways. “Dog Star” isn’t a particularly dense song yet there is so much going on within it: Tidd introduces it with a bass line over another odd time signature that finds Mitchell improvising over with a Prophet-6 while Okazaki stretching out in unison with Mitchell’s piano. The group darts in and out of microtonality during “To Dream Again,” making it truly dreamy but in a weirdly impactful way. And “Monstropolous” is Miles Okazaki’s forward-thinking conception of bop, unafraid to let Mitchell’s spaced-out synth contribute to the strange texture of the song.
Other times, Okazaki seems to be going for a certain, elusive vibe that transfigures over the course of a song. The guitarist goes acoustic on “Seven Sisters” and leaves the improvising to Rickman as the softer acoustic tones make way for caustic, electrified ones on this circular, ascending harmonic pattern. Okazaki plays in a semi-classical style forn “Anthemoessa,” a song that progresses through a complex mood.
Without relying on any bombast, Miles Okazaki constructs a series of songs that go against convention in telling an engaging musical story with each piece. The Sky Below is now on sale from Pi Recordings.
