feature photo: photo by Spencer Middleton
Woodwinds maestro Hailey Niswanger was still in her teens when she recorded, produced and released her first album Confeddie in 2009, a debut that impressed not just this writer, but many jazz critics much better known. Since that time, Niswanger finished her studies at Berklee, followed up Confeddie with another album in the bop vein (The Keeper) and then the funky and dance-oriented PDX Soul.
With her sextet MAE.SUN, Niswanger made a clean break in 2016 from the post-bop parameters that largely pegged her career up to that point, leading a band of fellow up-and-comers from her generation that positioned her as a more progressive and contemporary-minded artist. Niswanger began to write material that broke away from preset notions of how a song or a performance is supposed to go and trusted her instincts more. But even after a move from New York to southern California, MAE.SUN wasn’t the terminal point of her musical journey.
In 2019, Niswanger met the young L.A.-based guitarist, producer and composer Mia Garcia, and with a shared vision the two quickly formed the musical partnership OHMA that utilizes the multi-instrumentalist talents they both possess. Between All Things is the first product of this partnership. With Garcia, Niswanger moves even further away from her jazz roots toward music that puts you in a relaxed, spiritually satisfying state. That’s by design: “We encourage the listener to be guided by the sounds to where they must go,” affirms Niswanger.
With just minimal help from labelmates Bennie Bock and Abe Rounds, Garcia and Niswanger painstakingly put the music together all by themselves using a wide range of instruments both acoustic and electronic. Wordless choral vocals and woodwind chorales help to blur the lines between digital and analog sonic terrains, but create organic feels.
“Seeing Beyond What Is Here” is a like a mental foray into a quietly thriving, aural grove, while “Worlds Within Worlds” envelopes the ears with Garcia’s lush chords and Niswanger’s fluttering flute and saxophone. Aerial vocal harmonies, not instruments, reside at the center of “Between All Things,” supplanted by a cosmic, altered spoken word passage.
Though the songs seem to flow right into each other, the duo do employ different tactics in arranging the material. The appropriately titled “Organically Unfolding” keeps the blissful vibe going without plugged instruments, a piano and a chorus of woodwinds handling the task in this percussion-less piece. Classical arrangements underpin “Everything & Nothing,” deftly combined with acoustic guitar, vintage synths and barely-perceptible vocals.
Garcia’s no-nonsense but wiry bass lines is a factor in framing riffs on a lot of these pieces – most notably the title track – and often emerges at unexpected times, such as midway through “A Primordial Dance.” “And So It Is” fully embraces the ambience suggested elsewhere, simply an electronically altered piano playing a drawn-out sequence of inviting chords inundating the listener’s ears with warm fuzzies.
Mia Garcia and Hailey Niswanger made a pure chilled vibe record with Between All Things, arguably the best such record of 2022. A commendable start for OHMA, who will hopefully create more music that is the perfect salve for these increasingly stressful times.
Between All Things comes to us through Colorfield Records.
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