Margasak, at Nowhere Street: "Last September I devoted significant space and time to a growing phenomenon I’ve noticed in jazz and improvised music, where microtonality and different tuning systems have given the usual harmonic foundation of the music a wobbly kick in the ass, opening up blends that might initially sound off. For listeners who’ve only heard music in equal temperament this stuff can prove disorienting or sound wrong on first encounter, but once we adjust and treat the sound as it is, exciting possibilities open up, adding an almost psychedelic quality to the music, which becomes particularly exciting when it’s deployed in improvisation settings. Last month drummer, bandleader, and composer Will Mason dropped a new quartet album that’s been giving me repeated pleasure."
"I suppose I’ve been aware of Mason about a decade ago, around the time he released Beams of the Huge Night for the New Amsterdam. At that point the label was a bit more closely aligned with a post-Bang on a Can contemporary classical vibe, albeit one that let in various indie pop threads into the discussion. But Mason’s album immediately hit like an outlier, closer to jazz-rock than contemporary music. I know that I tried to get into the music a couple of times, but my fusion allergies ultimately prevented me from giving it a fair shake back then. For the last decade Mason has balanced teaching, composing, and performing—a difficult task in modern America. At the same time, Mason is an academic, not just a musician who turned to education to make a living. His own interests veer toward microtonality and free jazz, and everything I’ve heard from has triangulated between those two pursuits and his double-billed cap as composer/drummer. But it wasn’t until I heard his fantastic new album Hemlocks, Peacocks (New Focus) that I was fully pulled in by his music. Suddenly, that earlier music makes greater sense, establishing a clear continuum that’s reached an apex on this new endeavor."
"I knew some of the players on Beams of the Huge Night—notably guitarists Travis Reuter and Andrew Smiley—the latter was a founding member of Little Women, and has a knack for nailing complex lines and patterns—but the music landed pretty far from jazz orthodoxy. Going back to it now I've been pleasantly surprised by certain things, such as the cycling microtonal riffing on the opening track “Finn,” which seems to anticipate a particular thread subsequently embraced by Horse Lords. Check it out below. The intricate charts articulated by those three along with oboist Stuart Breczinski, alto saxophonist Danny Fisher-Lochhead, singer Nina Moffitt, and bassist Dan Stein, go through endless peaks and valleys and ever-shifting topographies that accelerate and decelerate, and compress and expand with the meticulous focus on a new music ensemble. Over the course of an entire album the relentless energy and density can get a bit exhausting, but recent listens have actually proven exhilarating more than anything. Despite a certain egghead vibe, the commitment to Mason’s ideas is impressively complete, and at its most jacked-up it summons the wall-to-wall ferocity of the Flying Luttenbachers with a much more diverse timbre, toggling between the prog-rock attack and kaleidoscopic swirls of microtonal psychedelia. Still, despite the intensity, there are elements that feel a bit overblown, such as the dichotomy between the guitar-drums-bass core of 'Door 6' and the way Moffitt unspools florid, wordless flights—a juxtaposition that feels incongruous rather than bold. Still, nothing stays in the same place for very long, so even when something doesn’t work for me, it's usually over in a flash."
"The quartet on Hemlocks, Peacocks brings back Danny Fisher-Lochhead, who are joined by keyboardist deVon Russell Gray and saxophonist Anna Webber, an authority on this sort of approach as made plain in her excellent quintet Shimmer Wince. Gray actually plays two electronic keyboards “set at two pitch levels on two separate keyboards, one rooted on C and the other on 436Hz (a slightly flat A),” a decision based loosely on the tuning La Monte Young deployed on his landmark The Well-Tuned Piano. It’s Gray’s playing that really gives the music its strange harmonic quality, and both reedists have the seasoned ears and harmonic expertise to make hay from that setting. As if to set the tone, the opening piece “Hemlocks” is through-composed, an exploration of a tiny interval in which a hovering semi-drone rippling with bracing collisions of the keyboards and fluttering, twinned saxophone lines unfold over a rather static rhythm staked out by the drummer. The energy and dynamism hits much harder on “The Fallen Leaves, Repeating Themselves,” which is built around a fantastic saxophone duet with harmonies that move between just intonation and equal temperament, where some of the tightly coiled sax phrasing reminds me of Roma music, as if Ferus Mustafov has hijacked the session."