A truly astonishing set of improvisational works is poised for release on July 30, 2021 when keyboardist Matt Mitchell and drummer Kate Gentile unfurl a massive, 6-CD box set of all new material entitled Snark Horse.
Snark Horse isn’t a one-off collaboration even though most of us are seeing Mitchell’s and Gentile’s names co-headlined for a project for the first time. They’ve been collaborating since 2013, each coming up with these single bar pieces written within a day and letting their band members come up with whatever strikes them in the moment within the framework of the song and the group. The revolving set of musicians making up the Snark Horse ensemble include Kim Cass (bass), Ben Gerstein (trombone), Jon Irabagon (reeds), Davy Lazar (trumpet, cornet), Mat Maneri (viola), Ava Mendoza (guitar), Matt Nelson (saxophones) and Brandon Seabrook (guitar, banjo).
Over only three days, this subset of the current jazz world’s best improvisors performed these 60-plus compositions in single takes, songs that developed according to guidelines that could have produced an infinite set of outcomes. Mitchell further took some of these compositions to form the basis of sixteen additional pieces played entirely using electronics. The results are a large set of performances that are all distinctive from each other, due to the widely varying tactics employed for realizing each composition. The one common thread running through them all, aside from Gentile and Mitchell, is that they’re bristling with creativity.
It would be a monumental task to adequately chronicle what was achieved over these six discs, so I’m picking out one track give an idea of the level of the ingenuity that went into every one of them. That one track is three of these one-bar compositions: “for teens,” “spinal thought” and “peripheral drome,” available to stream above.
It’s a quartet setting, with the reeds and guitar credits for this particular track going to Irabagon for the former and Mendoza the latter. “for teens” is full of chord clustered Tim Berne-isms, which would lead me to conclude that this was composed by the member of the duo who spent a whole lot of time hanging around Berne. But no, this bar and the other two were the brainchildren of Gentile. That densely packed figure permutates, which is probably where the players let their instincts transform the song, but remains in the vicinity of that original riff.
“spinal thought” is the briefest of the trio of pieces, a segue between the first and last bars. “peripheral drome” is spatial and spacey in stark contrast to “teens,” liberally peppered with Mitchell’s sci-fi synths and Irabagon switching from sax to a quietly busy clarinet. Like most of the other cuts on Snark Horse, “for teens,” “spinal thought” and “peripheral drome” are spare conceptions with rich detail filled in on the fly from the assembled collection of improvisation masters.
Snark Horse is being made available through PI Recordings and can be pre-ordered from Bandcamp.
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