Brass Mask — Spy Boy
This album is strangely home to both the very simple and the very complex. 1/3 to 1/2 of the album are traditional marching or carnival band pieces, featuring bold, simplistic snare rhythms and loud, detuned unison iterations of familiar melodies. "I Thank You Jesus" is much like an old spiritual played on the horns; the melody so recalls an old slave song that one can hear the words of the title in the sound of the horns. In the liner notes of the album, Challenger describes taking inspiration from African American mardi gras street bands.
However, these musicians don't play them with any particular zeal or raw emotion, rather a cool, controlled smoothness, which doesn't particularly work for the simplicity of the aforementioned "I Thank You Jesus" or "Indian Red", but works better for contemplative hard bop melody of "Shallow Water", which bounces clever solos off of the simplistic chorus. There are some nice eerie nocturnal jazz tonalities in this track as well as "Nighty Night" that suggest a darker Monk inspired direction. I'm more interested in this than their attempts with carnival band music; the ideas are just too far removed from their original context here to have much bite.
The rest of the songs are deviously polyrhythmic composed epics like "Wizards", for example, which is 9 minutes long, and dwells on tension filled chords like a vintage adventure film soundtrack. This is more akin to Challenger's other band Dice Factory, who specialized in songs that sound like the band wrote them to see if they could mess themselves up; timing exercises with harmonies that could only be described as 'generative' or 'mathematical', or in other words, not chosen for their aesthetic value, but for their place in some obtuse organizational scheme.
In "Francis P", the band plays a lengthy, assymmetrical figure repeatedly while the drummer speeds and slows the tempo in controlled volleys, and the rest of the band stays attempts (and succeeds) to stay locked to his elastic pulse. It has a whimsical snarkiness about it, but also certainly the feel of an exercise.
The dissonance is cringe-worthy at times, and one never knows where the beat will fall... though it's so tightly organized, I'd as quickly call it some form of classical or progressive music as jazz; it's 'musician's music', to be sure. A song like "Rain Rain Rain", with its labyrinthine chord progressions and jerky stop start rhythms, takes several listens to even begin to process, though I don't have anything negative to say about it. During these sorts of tracks, they seem to completely drop the New Orleans carnival band theme.
The tones and layers of brass are always a pleasant sound, in general, not too dry or piercing, rather a chorused, warm texture. The players are quite good at blending with each other and taking the 'edge' off of their brass, however I feel they don't use enough dynamics, and end up at a mezzo forte for most of the album.
Tom Challenger is clearly a man with an endless flow of ideas, and he throws a lot of them at you on this album, though they are placed in an organization I find questionable. He is evidently fascinated by these carnival band pieces, however in my mind they add little to the album, sounding big, dumb and obvious by comparison to everything else, and playing odd games with the attention span. They make it more difficult to absorb the massive and technical fusion pieces, which in turn make the simplistic carnival music sound insincere. That said, the album is reasonably listenable as a whole because the marching band pieces are the shortest, and with 13 tracks of drastically different varieties, there's enough good material here to justify many listens. "Spy Boy" is flawed, but contains copious amounts of craft and intelligence. Challenger remains a musician on my watch list.