Albatrosh — Yonkers

The piano and saxophone duo Albatrosh released "Yonkers" this year, an album with 8 original compositions around 5 minutes each, mostly in a melodic classic jazz style, with a few passages of looser improvisation peppered in for good measure.  There are many abrupt chord changes, and the arrangements are often quite technical, but rarely dissonant and never abrasive.

The saxophone player has a smooth, confident tone, and plays the complex head melodies effortlessly and expressively, with a pleasant, whimsical quavering in the most climactic notes.  These melodies have the nostalgic and melancholic, yet accepting feeling I often look for in jazz, and remind me of strolling a city boulevard, thinking and people watching.

However, it often seems that after the head melody ends, the rhythmic and tonal grounding is lost in a flurry of notes.  The piano player is guilty of intentionally disrupting the rhythm by filling any empty space with syncopated runs up and down the keyboard, and being that this is a duo, this results in a feeling of looseness to their interplay.  It's a shame, as greater cohesion would have allowed my brain to better process the saxophone player's unpredictable melodic tangents.  The opener "Albony & Ivory" suffers most from this.  Luckily, some of the slower numbers "Coral Fox" and "Pannebrask" feel more natural, and have more careful note choices.

Despite the business of the music, it is not aggressive or fierce: they never rise above mezzo-forte.  It seems the duo is unsure of what they want to accomplish.  "Linedance" and several other tracks dissolve unexpectedly into sparse, drifting minimalism, which fails to engage me due to lack of strong gestural devices that could have cemented some kind of momentum or structure, or related these sections to the more conventional parts of the pieces.

The darkest and most successful track is "Central Park", which successfully fuses a quietly brooding ambient passage of faintly gasping saxophone tones to a spiralling melodic soliloquy from the piano player, in his best moment on the record.

There is a good mood to this music, but I can't shake the feeling that these musicians never quite let loose their passion and play out.  They seem bogged down in technicalities, particularly the piano player.  The compositions themselves have a lot of excess that could have been trimmed off.  Perhaps the saxophone player's talent could be best recognized with other accompaniment.  Albatrosh's "Yonkers" is a decent record with a few great melodies, but I doubt I'll ever listen to it again.  Consult some Wayne Shorter for jazz that is both deeply exploratory and perfectly coherent.