SAMUEL BLASER

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CD: STREAM I BANDCAMP

Moods notes

Trying times can beget good things. While the first COVID-19 lockdown forced Samuel Blaser off the road, idleness gave him the time to set up his digital imprint, Blaser Music, which released four recordings in the spring and summer of 2020. The liner notes for the first, Audio Rebel, proclaimed that “Jazz is all about the quick pivot that appositely resolves a potentially wrong note.” But now that the pandemic’s duration can be measured in seasons, another musical form’s lessons apply. What can tell us more about perseverance under ongoing duress than the blues?  

While the blues aren’t new material for Blaser, he made them the theme of his last quartet recording, Early In The Mornin’ (Out Note, 2018). The album included traditional American tunes such as “Black Betty” and “Tom Sherman’s Barroom,” as well as originals inspired by the methods and examples of Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars and American pianist Mal Waldron. The album envisioned the blues not as a historical-stylistic artifact, but as one element of a songbook ripe with creative potential. The group he assembled to realize the project included bassist Masa Kamaguchi, drummer Gerry Hemingway, and keyboardist Russ Lossing, whose clavinet and electric piano playing supplied essential grit and grease.

In October 2020, the restrictions on assembly relaxed enough to for Blaser to venture an eight-date tour of Germany, Poland, and Switzerland. Lossing was unable to join the otherwise European-based band, so one of Blaser’s most enduring collaborators, French guitarist Marc Ducret, stepped in. Although he and Blaser hadn’t worked together in a quartet setting since 2013, the chemistry they have distilled in duo, trio, and other combos sharpens the attack of this one. If Blaser’s approach to “Early In The Mornin’” expresses first effort and then defiance, Ducret’s solo, which builds from a blizzard of notes to a cloud of fuzz and then resolves with some unceremoniously chopped chords, simply blows weariness away. The blues aren’t only about melancholy and world-weariness, they’re about successful transcendence.

Hemingway has given staunch support to Anthony Braxton, developed electroacoustic compositions, and played countless varieties of jazz, but all of his abilities rest upon a blues foundation. He doesn’t just drum on Moods; he’s a multi-instrumentalist, spirit guide, and paradigm-shifter. During the creeping introduction to “Tom Sherman’s Barroom,” his vocalizations match Blaser’s exclamations, bark for bark and growl for growl; his harmonica and Blaser’s horn braid rough-edge ribbons of sound during “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground.” But his drumming on “Levee Camp Moan Blues” doesn’t just lead the way, it creates a shape-shifting framework of commentary around the rest of the band’s charge. In the face of so much extroversion, Kamaguchi picks his moments carefully. Much of the time, he holds the tonal and rhythmic center without calling attention to himself. But listen for the moment when he stealthily slips into a cowboy movie clip-clop groove during “Dark Was The Night;” sometimes when that night is darkest, some just has to crack wise. Its takes many shades and many moods to make up the blues.

- Bill Meyer

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