Review Summary: Highly respectable boilerplate Blue Note from a veteran
Joe Chambers has lent his aggressive, cymbal-heavy drum style to some of the great jazz luminaries over the decades. His greatest contribution was perhaps on Andrew Hill’s masterpiece Compulsion!!!, in which his technical, smooth, yet expansive and intense style provided a solid framework for Andrew and company to build their proto-free jazz explorations around. His own career as a leader has been somewhat less notable as, in spite of formidable technical ability and a talent for composition, his albums have, for the most part, been too easy to pigeonhole as the kind of modal post-bop that other figures had been exploring the limits of for well more than a decade by the time of his debut. And while his latest album is still nestled comfortably within genre confines, Chambers demonstrates effortlessly that he has lost none of his instrumental ability or his knack for an ear-pleasing experience.
Kurt Weill standard This Is New is a familiar retread for Chambers, who recorded the piece with Chick Corea in the 60s. Here, the bouncy bebop rhythms have been smoothed out, contours planed into a cool, effortless iteration. The title track, penned by pianist Andrés Vial, demonstrates much of what is appealing about the album: rumba rhythms, touches of Afro-Cuban jazz, soloists lithely dancing around seesaw polyrhythms, all strung together by a cool, effortless sense of technical mastery. City of Saints, the other Vial composition, is a more staid take on a 5/4 nocturnal mood piece that, if not the highlight that the title track is, gives a taste of the absolute mastery of rhythmic subtlety and dynamics that Chambers is capable of.
Dance Kobina sees Chambers also reflecting on his own long career, as no less than three of the compositions presented were written by Chambers himself and recorded on previous albums. That the new versions of his tunes are able to live up to the old ones is gratifying, if expected. That Caravanserai should surpass the original by adopting an atmospheric, mysterious approach that is both more intense, while being more pared back and elegant than its relatively staid predecessor is nothing less than impressive. It’s more than just a “he’s still got it” moment, it’s a moment of vitality and real artistic growth at a stage in life where the expectations for a reworking of old material might be just that they live up to the previous version. Would that the rest of the material lived up to this highlight, but the rest of the album nonetheless manages to maintain a standard that never dips below enjoyable. The bobbing, polyrhythmic Gazelle Suite, the relaxed nocturnal vibe of Intermezzo, all come together in a musical offering that is never less than a pure, technically impeccable jazz experience.
The members of Chamber’s ensemble are all bringing their best efforts here, and the result is always unimpeachable. Pianist Andrés Vial, who lends two of his own pieces to the album, is probably the great instrumental powerhouse of the album next to Chambers, his playing agile and light, his strengths lying in a subtle uses of dynamics and a nimble, delicate technique tempered by a restrained elegance. As for the other members of the ensemble, Michael Davidson’s vibraphone contributions are atmospheric and moody, and the contributions of sax player Caoilainn Power are consistently impressive, even if they never stray beyond the conventional, while bassist Ira Coleman has been rendered barely audible in the mix. Overall, the playing is as crisp as the production, indeed, the worst thing one can say about the whole thing is that it tends towards the shallow, the lightweight, but all of that tends to be left behind in the face of how
good it all still sounds and how much Chambers still has left to say.
