Lage Lund: Terrible Animals

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Tyshawn Sorey (p, perc)
Sullivan Fortner (p)
Larry Grenadier (b)
Lage Lund (g)

Label:

Criss Cross Jazz (CD)

May/2019

Media Format:

CD

RecordDate:

26 April 2018

Lund's credentials are gold plated: Juillard, Berklee and a Fulbright scholarship seem to point inevitably toward jazz's glittering prizes. Yet perhaps it's only with Terrible Animals that he's broken free of, how can we say, the reins of his musical intellect. Heroes like Hindemith and Messiaen hint at Lund's knotty seriousness, but the surprise here is the embracing of effects, which are used not just as colourings or as a dramatic infill, but to counterpoint, even wrench around, Lund's more familiar clean and intimate sound. So the opening ‘Hard Eights’, which could have locked down as an earnest exercise in bop, escapes the tyranny of those hard eights in swirls of effects. And, of course, it helps to have the drum professor, Tyshawn Sorey, on board: his freedom on the likes of ‘Aquanaut’ bounces that insistent melody into a whole new place, especially when those sprung rhythms leap and dance along with Fortner's piano. In turn, Grenadier's light-stepping bass (again geared tight to Sorey's drums) propels us through the far from suppressed ‘Suppressions’. No terrible animals here, just great jazz – free and singing, yet underwritten with a bop rigour. Andrew Hill would smile…

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