Will Holshouser Trio – Singing to a Bee

Clean Feed 54

Agent to a host of musical contexts, the accordion has its share of musical baggage. Will Holshouser shoulders the load like a seasoned skycap, referencing the instrument’s wide ranging vernaculars from Tango, to Cajun, to Tejano, to Parisian musette. He has the argot of free improvisers like Guy Kluscevsek and Andrea Parkins covered too with a fleet fingers working the buttons and bellows to shape eccentric patterns and spiraling tonal smears. By contrast, Ron Horton’s trumpet is frequently crisp and direct. Attuned to melody and rhythm, he is indispensable to the trio’s shapely chamber sound. David Phillips, son of the inestimable Barre, has a tall paternal shadow to contend with, but he seems hardly ruffled by the prospect. His soft-toned, but sprightly pizzicato and warm woodsy arco work as closely aligned counterparts to Holshouser’s always-tuneful improvisations.

Taped live in front of an unobtrusive Portuguese audience the program contains seven original pieces, a collective improv and a traditional folk tune. The trio exhibits a cinematic flair over the set’s 45-minute duration, cycling through episodes that conjure colorful visual analogues. Holshouser isn’t content to contain himself to coaxing conventional sounds on his squeezebox and frequently ventures into eloquent polytonality. On the title track, he mimics the swelling sonorities of pump and pipe organs. During “Uma Bica” it’s the keening tapered tones of a chromatic harmonica cooked up by the leader’s dancing digits. Horton answers with crackling streams of notes and Phillips buttresses the bottom with a percolating bass barrage.

The chamber Zydeco of “Far Away Home” sounds like a sheaf from the Clifton Chenier songbook while “Fish Head Stomp” is more Joe Falcon in flavor, two sides of the same Creole coin. On both pieces, Holshouser summons the lilting syncopations of the Bayou while cleverly subverting them in the process. “La Esperanza” taps Texas ranchera traditions and the trio once again places creative spin on a traditional cultural form. Snatches surface where the interplay feels a bit sleepy and sedate, as on parts of “Brooklyn Research” and “Namless”, but overall it’s a quietly engaging outing stocked with the sort of telegraphic communication creative music listeners crave. Holshouser and his mates aren’t about flash and bluster, preferring instead to plumb ensemble possibilities calmly and with a careful ear toward confluent lyricism. The elegant “Grace in Mid-Fall” is perhaps the finest example of their collusive approach, sounding through composed and neo-classical, but never stolid in its consonant chorale articulation. Spin this one for your favorite Frankie Yankovic-loving uncle and see if he doesn’t take a shine.

~ Derek Taylor