The Absolute Sound
A dozen years ago, Lester Bowie recorded an album called Serious Fun, which might serve well for this disc, too, though Misha Mengelberg & Co. drink more deeply from both parts of the title. Mengelberg is a Dutch pianist-composer whose style has roots in Monk, Mingus, Herbie Nichols, and the myriad streams of jazz and classical avant-garde โ which is to say, his music is playfully witty, sometimes madcap, but more tightly structured than you might at first thinkโฆDouglas first joined forces with Mengelberg a few years ago, when he and his piano-less quartet learned a bunch of Mengelberg compositions (no easy task) and then asked the Dutchman himself to sit in with them at a live gig. On this disc, Douglas brings along the agile bass player from that date, Brad Jones. The result is a fresh blast of crazyquilt blues, ballads, circus tunes, and other bits beyond category, all of which swing like the proverbial demon. The three non-Mengelberg tunes, by the way, are Monk standards, which Mengelberg hurls in a funhouse where the mirrors elongate or compress the angles without ever rounding them off or โ more amazing โ losing Monkโs spirit. More wondrous still, if such were possible, is the soundโฆThis ranks as one of the best digital jazz recordings ever โ brash, airy, vivid, seamlessly spacious, with a black-curtain quiet backdropโฆJoe Ferla is, once more, the man at the control board, again with tube mics, except for a ribbon mic on the trumpet and a couple dynamic spot mics on the tom-toms (a stereo tube mic over the trapset, though). He recorded live-to-2-track digital on Sonyโs much-acclaimed DSD machine, which impressed Ferla greatly. Even so, he mixed it in analog on an old Neve console.
Fred Kaplan
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