Dave Ballou – Insistence

Steeplechase 31611

A Steeplechase loyalist throughout his career, trumpeter Dave Ballou is also one of the Danish label’s most reliably freer leaning players. This particular set was originally scheduled as a quartet, but violinist Mat Maneri was sidelined after a gig that piqued Ballou’s interest in the possibilities of recording as trio. He and drummer Randy Peterson are regular collaborators with the Maneris and both espouse strong stylistic affinities with the father and son team. Peterson’s one of those players who always seems to slip my mind, but renewed exposure to his idiosyncratic percussive style always makes me smack my forehead in shame at the forgetfulness. Building energy from oblique angles, his retracting arrhythmias recall the pulse-oriented work of Sunny Murray. There’s a near constant feeling of pulling back and slipping away in his stick and brush play, the opposite of a conventionally propulsive drummer concerned with metric constraints.

Ballou favors a complementary approach to brass, dissecting melodic kernels and uncovering the improvisatory mazes within. Cool, rounded straight tones on the pieces like the opening “Restraint” bleed into sharper, more acidic voicings others like “Randy Starts.” Bassist Michael Formanek is a minor marvel, the tenacious harmonic adhesive that sometimes keeps the music from completely shirking its moorings. His porous pizzicato shifts from prickly thickets to elongated ambling strides and there are points where he almost seems to playing his bass with a bottle neck slide, the decaying echo of timbral reverberations hanging in the air. Bow play is sparse, but incisive on pieces like the self-reverential “MF.” Fans of the Maneris microtonal odysseys will find a great deal to enjoy here and at the very least, the disc succeeds in showing there’s more to Steeplechase than bop retreads and standards-centered jam sessions.

[Steeplechase titles are available directly through Stateside Distributors: Stateside AT prodigy.net]

~ Derek Taylor