music

Jazz/film composer Terence Blanchard describes his four-year stint with jazz legend Art Blakey as a liberating experience, the perfect lesson for a young, free-spirited musician trying to find his voice. He says that while the “parents” in his world (academia, jazz purists) told him, “no, no, don’t do it that way”, grandparent figure Blakey stood back and encouraged him to try everything to figure out his own voice.Blanchard must have passed this aesthetic on to Darryl Reeves during a lesson (Reeves studied with Blanchard at the University of New Orleans), as Diary of a Bandstandsimply asks, “What if?” Though their music is best described as jazz, Reeves and his capable band enjoy toying with the edges of its boundaries and tastefully exploring mutations of the genre — after adding a few related elements.Reeves takes a chance, confounding expectations with the straight-up hip-hop opener, “The Return (feat. Gunn Fu)”. His version of the style is much more organic than the usual fare, he and his band lean towards The Roots (featuring Chick Corea) by insisting on non-sequenced Rhodes, upright bass and live horns. However, as Professor Gunn Fu, a squirrelly high-pitched character on a par with Madlib’s cohort Quasimoto and Kanye West’s alter ego, announces the band’s mission and interstellar manifesto, you’ll adjust your seatbelt and prepare for an interesting ride.

The band immediately shifts to a swinging funk-ish approach for “The Meeting”. After the scratchy, vinylized horn intro, the rhythm section explodes into a tricky polyrhythmic web, which they somehow maintain throughout the work. The most intriguing aspect of this texture is fashioned by Rhodes player Robert Glasper; he lets his instrument hover just above the others, syncopating his über-mysterious, almost-missing-the-beat chords in interesting places along the measure. Further upping the tempo (but not compromising performance quality), the band aggressively takes on “Comprehension of Self”, showing interplay in league with the hardbop masters. Though the individual parts are impressive, the most remarkable aspect of the piece (and the entirety Diary of a Bandstand) is the robust level of performance. Each solo from these distinctive musical personalities is as moving and extraordinary as the next. They listen to each other’s ideas: each of them repeats the previous soloist’s tricky gestures, then cleverly flips them and claims ownership. The members all contribute to Reeves’s compositions in a way that provides musical contrast, yet never breaks the momentum (the camaraderie of Oliver Nelson’s “Yearnin’” and Freddie Hubbard’s “Suite Sioux” comes to mind.)

A pair of skits switch up the format. “Interlude (Ready to Start)” is a studio blooper (yes, he says “blooper”) of the band groaning and tinkering around; “Remix” demonstrates Reeves’s production skills as he samples bits “from the session” and turns them into a mini jazz-hop number (“Wait till y’all see what else I have up my sleeve. This is just a teaser,” he guarantees in the liner notes.) These aren’t the disc’s strongest tracks, but you have to admire Reeves for including this bit of peculiarity — and awaiting the blast from Jazz Times for doing so.

While the idea of fusing jazz with funk, soul and hip-hop is now familiar ground, you haven’t really experienced it until you hear Reeves and company’s take. Their execution is precise — they never stumble over their notes as they explore the limits of their abilities, switching gracefully from meter to meter and bouncing from genre to genre. Reeves shows that he’s comfortable with the jazz label, but prefers to move confidently in new directions.

-Dave Madden, Splendidezine.com