Joan Torres has led the jazz-fusion ensemble All Is Fused since 2011 and they have released five albums since 2012 and won many awards and accolades.
Embrace From was intended to celebrate their 10-year collaboration as an unconventional group. Early in the creation of the album, Torres and All Is Fused learned they were recipients of a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, which gave them added cause for celebration. The lineup also includes Jonathan Suazo on alto sax, Gabriel Vicens on guitar, Emmanuel Rivera on piano and keyboard, Fernando Garcia, on drums and percussion, and Joan Torres, on bass and production.
That sense of uplift and celebration is felt throughout Embrace From as Joan Torres’s All Is Fused work their way through an eclectic ensemble of numbers. The opener, “Cotati Reset,” coalesces out of eclectic but musically related phrases into a track of imaginative harmonics. Then “Unexpectations” opens with percussive rhythms and phrases which sit across the rhythm patterns before the number develops into a rocky, deep-throated blend of percussive elements from the instruments, pinned together by the drums.
The groove is deeply explored as the ensemble works through the tracks, using common musical forms or compositional techniques such as verse-chorus (on “Explode”), vamps (on “Friends, Memories, Loops”), cannon (on “Crystalline”) as well as open improvisation (on “Cotati Reset”) or call and response, (such as on “Caribbean Mountains”). The tracks lean toward these styles overall, on each one there is no set pattern and many tracks interweave techniques and styles, meaning there is an affinity across the recording. The tracks link into each other while still standing alone.
Quite astoundingly multi-genre in its concepts and influences, Joan Torres’s All Is Fused may be known as a fusion jazz band but here their improvisational skills come to the fore. They weave styles together that create a far freer flow to their music – and it is brilliantly subversive.
“No Voices Lost” includes an outstanding solo arc from Jonathan Suazo across a harmonized ensemble, which sounds remarkably like the theme from a James Bond movie at times. “Friends, Memories, Loops” is a glorious, free-flowing sound picture with gloriously colorful segments rising out of the darker rhythmic background of sweeping repeated phrases.
Embrace Form explores the relationship between music that is experimental and music that is more familiar and comfortable. Joan Torres’s All Is Fused use familiar forms but enhance and mold them to suit a free-flowing release of energized sound. The title is appropriate because the ensemble embraces many forms and then delivers them to the listener in new and subtly altered ways.
- Joan Torres’s All Is Fused – ‘Embrace Form’ (2024) - July 14, 2024
- Julian Costello – ‘Vertigo’ (2024) - June 29, 2024
- Eric Anders and Mark O’Bitz – ‘Contrapasso’ (2024) - June 21, 2024
