What Place Can Be for Us?

4 1/2 STARS The adventurous post-bop of the composer Anthony Branker, well expressed by the album Beauty Within by the Imagine quintet, finds new and more complex developments in this What Place Can Be for Us?. The group confirms the guitarist Pete McCann and the couple Fabian Almazan and Linda May Han Oh, expanding to a medium size band with some of the greatest young instrumentalists in New York: the trumpeter Philip Dizack, the saxophonists Walter Smith III and Remy Le Boeuf, the drummer Donald Edwards and vocalist Alison Crockett.

If in the previous album there were already convulsive rhythms on irregular metrics and melodic lines with dissonant openings, here elements of a clear M-Base brand are added, broadening the timbral spectrum and developing sharp contrasts.

What Place Can Be For Us? it is a wide-ranging work, ambitious in its intent but with a strong emotional impact: sinuous lines in unison develop on obsessive and dilated rhythmic cycles, integrating distorted sounds of the electric guitar, incisive recited lyrics, fervent sax and trumpet solos and radiant piano interventions.

Trumpeter and composer who trained in the early nineties alongside Jim McNeely and Manny Albam, Branker directed jazz courses at Princeton University for years despite the two cerebral aneurysms caused by the same arteriovenous malformation that affected Pat Martino.

Today, at the age of 65, he conducts three different ensembles (the other two are called Word Play and Ascent) and has reached his eighth album for the Origin label. This suite was born from Branker's strong disturbance at the suffering caused by the numerous war conflicts in the world, in particular the Syrian one: for populations, belonging to their places of origin proves to be increasingly fragile and precarious.

The album opens with "The Door of No Return," a composition that recalls the historic slave trade with the recitation of a poem by the Brazilian Beatriz Esmer. After the relaxed "Sundown Town" (lyrical interventions by Almazan and Dizack), it is Langston Hughes' lyrics that characterize "I, Too, Sing America", a song with an obsessive and dissonant ending. The connections with the M-Base aesthetic begin to manifest themselves from the fourth theme, "Invisible" but Branker knows how to integrate them in new forms, alternating them with intimate and refined songs where Linda May Han Oh, Almazan, Dizack and McCain have space ("We Went Where The Wind Took Us," "The Trail Of Tears To Standing Rock").

A significant and engaging work, Anthony Branker's most imaginative and among the most successful of the year.

*Translated from Italian