Florian Weber • Lucent Waters
 or Lucent Waters, German pianist/composer Florian Weber
assembled a sterling trio, with Linda May Han Oh on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. That
trio makes an even more potent quartet on three tracks, adding Ralph Alessi, trumpeter
with power chops and reliable pitch who’s been on a years-long hot streak. Alessi
animates the rangy melody that spins off a six-note ascending/descending figure, in
swaying-seaweed rhythm, at the heart of Weber’s "From Cousteau’s Point of
View." Florian writes the trumpeter a Miles Davis ballad, in "Fragile
Cocoon"; the influence is plain in Alessi’s phrasing and sense of space, but he
doesn’t sound like a copycat, not least because he doesn’t aim for Miles’s
much-imitated timbre. The trumpeter has his own distinctive, wiry sound, that maintains
its voicelike quality even when he’s leaping all over the horn’s range. Alessi
always lands on his feet, and on point.
"Butterfly Effect" could pass for a tune off one of the late trumpeter Kenny Wheeler’s ECM albums: wide dissonant intervals are rendered gorgeously majestic. Alessi’s opening solo yields to the light-on-its-feet rhythm trio, the bassist soloing within the ensemble. Linda Oh has a tough, springy bass attack, nicely captured in this recording: it sounds like a real bass, woody and resonant. Nasheet Waits demonstrates one of a modern drummer’s crucial jobs: coloring the backgrounds with perfect timing. His rustling brushwork is not so much discreet as subliminal, quietly influencing the band’s collective beat. That buoyant rhythm section lays down an inviting backdrop for Alessi’s second helping on "Butterfly Effect," somersaulting over the top. On Weber’s solo which follows, his (tune-derived) wide-interval trajectories may echo the trumpeter’s, albeit executed with pianistic timing; those instruments don’t sing the same way. (Enough talk, please, about Earl Hines playing "trumpet style"; who’s more pianistic than Earl Hines?) Florian Weber’s compositions invite the players in, and reflect the harmonic subtleties of the classic American Broadway/movie songbook. That influence is one reason he bonded with poetic but picky alto saxophone veteran Lee Konitz, the honoree of "Honestlee," one of a couple of trio ballads I wish Alessi had stuck around for. It’s halfway through before Weber fully unpacks the tender melody. Alas, it also inspires him (not for the only time) to sing faintly along, in that distracted way pianists do. (Free advice for keyboardists and guitarists: unless you can sing like George Benson, please don’t.) An arpeggiated bass line emerging toward the end pulls the arrangement together. The pianist betrays other influences; "Schimmelreit" features a slow melody over alternating chords, the opening notes pointedly echoing Erik Satie’s "Gymnopédie No. 1." The parallel becomes plainer later when Oh falls into a two-beat, root-and-fifth bass figure. Satie’s piano poems confirm how effective simplicity can be, and Weber doesn’t overplay either. The short opening invocation "Brilliant Waters" is a case in point; he eases into it out of the silence. Weber isn’t quite Satie spare, but sometimes a couple of lonely held notes are enough. It’s an ECM recording so you know some of what to
expect: a lot of reverberant room sound to make Weber’s pearly touch even pearlier.
To my ears, the resonance takes a little definition away from the drums’
short/clipped sounds; Waits is so subtle you don’t want to miss a thing. On his
feature "Time Horizon," he takes off from a pile-driver rock beat, of the sort
Tony Williams would play at a shout in the 1960s. It’s a drum solo with
accompaniment. Bassist Oh thumps along in insistent E-flat, and piano floats over the top,
out of tempo, in conceptual counterpoint. The watery album and song titles go with the
waves of sound. |
