“An album of mood music for the mind as well as the spirit”- so reads the capstone sentence of the preambluary blurb on the back of this recent Riverside reissue of a 1956 album. It’s a statement, however vague, that communicates the lilting, highly introspective nature of the accompanying music. Mundell Lowe plays close attention to structure and melody, but his variations on a dozen ballads realized by trio and single horn support (with a sole instance of overdubbing) are strangely aloof in relinquishing their charms. Tune times are almost universally terse. Blink or sneeze and you might miss one as it saunters by. The guitarist’s chops are manifold, honed across a sessionography that continues to accumulate today and contains many dates with vocalists. Here his style is one designed to quickly beguile, but the overt elegance masks a deeper beauty.
I found my experiences with this disc timely to the recent Paris Trans editorial on listening frequency. My first spin came up pretty close to empty in terms of emotional and creative piquancy. Initial impulse: write the session off as another antiquated ‘mood’ session organized to fleece the casual housewife jazz consumer from her cash. The next trip through didn’t fare much better. I still couldn’t get beyond the cloyingly strummed chords coupled to soporific snail-paced tempos and skeletal bass drums accompaniment.
The bassist here, one Trigger Alpert, possesses a moniker on par with the leader. His supple figures accentuate rather than interfere. Drummer Ed Shaughnessy is barely audible in places, seemingly shaping his Swiss-cheese beats with feather-tipped brushes and cotton swabbed sticks. If anything the presence of various classically-grounded instruments brandished by Al Klink (bass clarinet, flute) and Phil Bodner (oboe, English horn) only compounds the droopy-lidded temperament pregnant in Lowe’s ploddingly passive musings.
Somewhere around the sixth sitting with the disc my opinion underwent a tectonic shift. Lowe’s filigree constructions, so often wrapped in sheathes of shimmering tonal gauze, began to click. So did the languid clarity of his sidemen’s floating intuitive support. This music is minimalist, but still exudes a quiet, entrancing appeal. Much like Giuffre, Lowe relies on space and placement to erect patterns of subtle extemporization. But his tone is a warm glowing hearth to the clarinetist’s textured cobalt blue cool. It isn’t so much what he plays (the aforementioned drowsy chords and gilded note chains), but instead what he and his colleagues leave to the imagination. Where they falter is in the delivery. All of the immaculate playing almost undermines the details of what’s developing beneath the beauteously rounded surfaces. For a mood music session, this disc requires surprising amounts of scrutiny to fathom what’s going on. Patience pays off. I found my opinion converted and feel confident others will have attitudes of skepticism reversed too.
~ Derek Taylor
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