Dave Liebman - Conversations

[Alon Marcus]

Not totally new, about a year old, but still fresh enough to be categorized in the "New Releases" forum.

As usual for me, I digested the album track wise, listening to portion of it per day. Some tunes are really catchy (in the positive sense, the album never sounds cheesy or cheap) like "Soft spoken" or "Snow Day" which features a deceptively effortless solo from Vic Juris.

Juris is one of the reasons to listen to this album, his solos are melodic and mostly traditional but he is able of creating atmospheric textures and sounds that serve well the small group orchestrations. Juris varies his guitars (sometimes on the same track) and overdubbes from time to time.

Liebman plays mainly soprano but he has some solo spots on tenor and uses the flute for diversity, to decorate the melodies.

Anubis is the track where they stretch out, a modal piece with Eastern motifs. Marko Marcinko, the drummer on this session, plays with a lot of energy and uses his

drum base extensively to create rock patterns that add rhythmic color.

They sound like a well rehearsed group; this is certainly not a blowin' session. The tight small band arrangements are effective and maximize the abilities of each instrument to the point where it sounds more reach in color and textures than the usual quartet of that type.

Edited September 25, 2004 by ztrauq22

[Joe G]

I haven't heard this album, but Vic Juris is incredible!

[Alon Marcus]

I haven't heard this album, but Vic Juris is incredible!

Joe, where did you hear Vic's playing?

[Joe G]

Vic came to Michigan for a couple of dates earlier this year. Our very own randissimo backed him up on those, and I caught the show in Ann Arbor. Talk about having a command of the instrument!!! The guy is something else. And I heard references to pretty much all of the history of jazz guitar, right up to the present, in his playing throughout the night.

[Alon Marcus]

A high praise indeed from a fellow guitarist !

Thanks for the info.

[cannonball-addict]

I heard this album recently. It didn't do much for me then but I was listening to it in a stack of stuff I was sent to review and I only reviewed the ones that immediately caught my attention. I usually try to listen blindly. I avoid eye-contact with the disc after I put them in the pile and I put them in the CD player randomly one after another.

At this moment, it didn't catch me but I'll have another listen. Isn't it with all European (possibly Norwegian) musicians?

I recall seeing a lot of unpronounceable names in the lineup.

Edited November 20, 2004 by cannonball-addict

[JSngry]

I recall seeing a lot of unpronounceable names in the lineup.

That was so cruel of their parents...

[jlhoots]

I haven't heard this album, but Vic Juris is incredible!

Vic Juris is excellent.

Someone gave me a CDr of a live session from late 2003 with Jeremy Steig (where's he been??) with Juris, Cameron Brown on bass & Billy Drummond on drums.

Nice stuff & Juris is outstanding.

Don't know if it'll ever see the light of day though.

[Alon Marcus]

Glad to revive this thread to add John Kelman's very interesting review from AAJ

When an artist has as a wide musical viewpoint as saxophonist Dave Liebman, and has released so many albums in a 35-year career that touch on so many aspects of jazz—big band to solo, highly structured to free, acoustic to electric—one would think that there’d be little chance of surprise left.

Wrong. Released in ’03, Conversation—featuring his steady ‘90s group with guitarist Vic Juris, bassist Tony Marino and, in this case, drummer/percussionist Marko Marcinko substituting for quartet regular Jamey Haddad—has clearly been overlooked. And that’s a shame. In a time when fans are lauding artists like trumpeter Dave Douglas and guitarists Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny for their ability to intrepidly tackle a diversity of musical approaches, all the while retaining distinctive and recognizable voices, the truth is that Liebman has been doing this all along.

That’s not to disrespect any of the aforementioned artists; only to suggest that based on Conversation, Liebman and his group deserve the same kind of attention. In addition to his ability to conjoin a variety of styles into something purely personal, the special relationship he has with guitarist Vic Juris has been instrumental in allowing him the freedom to pursue anything that grabs his attention.

Like those who consider him to be peers—Metheny, Scofield, Frisell, and Abercrombie—Juris’ purview is greater than any one album can demonstrate, although on Conversation he’s working with arguably his broadest sonic palette to date. His own contributions to the disc—“Shorty George,” which, with its sharply angular and processed electric guitar, strummed acoustic, and insistent triplet over four rhythm, feels like an urban alternative to “Two Folk Songs” from Metheny’s 80/81; and the aptly-titled “Softly Spoken,” where Juris’ classical guitar brings Ralph Towner to mind—show the kind of musical discourse Liebman refers to in the album’s title. Elsewhere, on Liebman’s “Anubis,” Juris finds ways to fuse eastern and western harmonic and improvisational approaches.

As, of course, does Liebman. But, like Juris, that’s only part of the picture. On last year’s quartet release, In a Mellow Tone, Liebman wrote that, after disbanding the Miles and Coltrane-influenced band Quest in the late ‘80s, “the time had come for me to play and write more composed music with counter lines… eighth and odd meter rhythms, conveying… more tightly organized structures.” Liebman’s writing on Conversation is unquestionably more complex than the open-ended modal writing he did with Quest—just listen to the idiosyncratic stops and starts of the curiously funky “Tickle Bath,” or the chamber jazz ambience of the dark-hued “Renewal,” which features a searching arco solo from Marino and an enigmatic thematic core where improvisation and form are completely fluid.

But at the end of the day, despite more structure, it’s all about freely spoken musical dialogue within in a variety of musical contexts that still retain a consistent philosophy. Conversation is an advanced work that ranks among Liebman’s best and most adventurous; it's predictable only in its sheer un-predictability.

Visit Dave Liebman on the web.

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=18765