Skip to main content

Christian Sands Faces and Slays Dragons

Dragons appear in mythologies in Asia and Europe, from Judaism to Buddhism to Hinduism. They are bringers of wisdom, tyrannical harbingers of the apocalypse, and fearsome foes to be vanquished. Christian Sands, the 29-year-old rising star of jazz piano, has chosen to name his most recent release Facing Dragons, due in part to gaining wisdom as a leader – this is his third recording under his own name – and also his going in a new direction “musically and spiritually,” as he wrote in his acknowledgements on the disc, and facing dragons that may be fearsome. In taking risks, and collaborating with new musicians, Sands does not merely face his dragons.

All the way through the recording, Sands’ compositions are powerful, thoughtful, and elegant. eight of the nine cuts are originals, and range from straight-ahead jazz to improvisational introspection. The only piece Sands didn’t compose is an arrangement of the McCartney/Lennon number “Yesterday.” With the way Sands and the trio interpret the number, one would be hard-pressed to say the Beatles ever sounded as soulful, taking the listener on a dynamic roller coaster of crescendos and decrescendos.

Throughout the recording, Sands truly shines as a composer. He mixes polyrhythmic, Carnival-esque pieces like “Sangueo Soul” with up-tempo straight-ahead numbers like “Fight for Freedom.” He then brings the recording around with a quiet ballad and solo introspection with “Her Song” and “Rhodes to Meditation” [a delicious pun on the Fender Rhodes piano Sands uses on the piece]. The cut “Sunday Mornings” genuinely takes the listener to church with moving passages for the Hammond B-3 and for the guitar, while “Samba de Vela” is a wonderfully playful quintet number with Brazilian flair.

And let us not heap all the praise on Sands; the accompanying members of his ensemble all equally shine. Keyon Harrold’s trumpet and Marcus Strickland’s saxophone add a fuller body to Sands’ normal trio, and both Harrold and Strickland offer subtle nuance as well as scorching solos, particularly on the number “Fight for Freedom.” A band member Sands has not previously worked with is guitarist Caio Afiune. Afiune is a wonderful addition to the group, layering a rich, warm dimension onto already masterful pieces, specifically the soulfully warm ballad, “Her Song.”

Overall, this is an outstanding performance for Sands and his group. It’s ambitious, but not overly so. It delicately balances valleys of quiet with peaks of exuberance. New material and new collaborators lifts the recording, and pushes it forward. This is truly an outstanding piece of work, as a whole, and in it’s parts. If dragons were what Sands faced when confronting this project, they were certainly vanquished in the end.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as a Political Statement for the Ages.”

       For centuries, it has been the artists who pursue the active role in political discourse, in one form or another: the Folk artists of the late 1950s through the ‘60s; The Beats in the late 1940s through the ‘50s; even back to the Greek dramatists. During the politically charged atmosphere following the Enlightenment, there emerged a pool of writers – fueled by the turmoil of the French Revolution and empowered with the budding philosophy of The Rights of Man – who would take up the banner and use their voices, their words, to reject accepted social systems such as religion, spirituality, and politics. The Mask of Anarchy , written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819, is an occasional poem written about what became known as The Peterloo Massacre. However, Shelley understood that the political nature of the poem, as well as certain aspects which could be considered libelous, and therefore, didn’t publish the poem until 1832. Much has been written about the political philosophies of
Post a Comment
Read more

“Pennies on their eyes: Gullah/Geechee Culture and the Concept of ‘Otherness’ in Nikky Finney’s The World Is Round”

     The port at Charleston, South Carolina was one of the most important to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Colonies and the Americas. It is estimated that some 121,464 slaves were brought into the port of Charleston between 1716 and 1807 (Pollitzer 44-45). Through state and federal documentation, we know that the largest percentages of these slaves were, in order of largest to smallest, from Angola, Senegambia, and the Windward Coast of Africa (map 5, Pollitzer 46). While the majority of these slaves were sold to inland planters, many were sold to planters of the Sea Islands, a swath of lowland coastal plain islands stretching 400 miles from the southern coast of North Carolina, to the northern coast of Georgia. It is in the Sea Islands where the birth of Gullah/Geechee culture took place. For almost one hundred years, this culture thrived in near-isolation – it wasn’t until the 1930s, and some islands as late as the 1950s, that the islands were accessible to any transportatio
Post a Comment
Read more

Still Dreaming: Joshua Redman Walks the Tightrope of Free Jazz and Straight-Ahead

2018 marks the 25th year tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman has been recording. In that time, the son of avant-garde jazz musician Dewey Redman has made a solid name for himself and has presented a voice uniquely his own, through a vast body of recorded work—Still Dreaming is the 21st album released under Joshua’s name. Through beautiful collaborative pairings and some bold choices, Joshua Redman’s Still Dreaming continues to make his one-of-a-kind voice heard, while invoking spirits of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, his father, and other tenormen of yore. The choices Redman made with his quartet are brilliant; there is no piano player in this session, so all the rhythm work falls to bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade, while still allowing each of them to pursue melodic through lines. Redman’s pairings with trumpeter Ron Miles on “Unanimity” and “Haze and Aspirations” are reminiscent of the John Coltrane/Don Cherry pairings on Atlantic Records. Blade brings his impeccable bra
Post a Comment
Read more