The visage of Steve Lehman is a naturally serious one, lean with stern features and penchant for square spectacles that give him a scholarly bearing. As an avid student of Anthony Braxton that particular portraiture isn’t too far off the mark. Mathematics, and more specifically metrics, plays a pivotal role in Lehman’s music. This new Pi disc is stocked textbook examples of his studied compositional approach; it’s homework, but not in a pejorative sense.
A near-telepathic drummer is key to Lehman’s concepts and Tyshawn Sorey is an inspired choice for the slot, his constantly subdividing and recombinating beats as tight as the tautly stretched skin of a snare drum head. Bassist Drew Gress is less busy and his sparser patterns overlay those of Sorey like cheesecloth, allowing for a porous give and take and constituting a highly textured rhythmic compound. A layered onion effect also carries across to the horns. Lehman works out a devilish array of contrapuntal combinations for his frontline work with trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson. Some of the pieces conform to head arrangements, but the themes are so intricate that the music hardly feels rote. Vibraphonist Chris Dingman alternates between melodic and harmonic targets, taking the lead with blurred mallets one moment and easing back into colorful sustains the next.
Subjective referents for the music assert themselves from start with faint signals from Steve Coleman and Greg Osby coming through in the keenly attenuated rhythmic variations. I also detect elements of Blue Note-era Grachan Moncur III in some of Lehman’s writing through the blend of spaciousness, mild dissonance and repetition, especially on the interstitial piece “Great Plains of Algier”. Lehman keeps things on point and the album ticks by at a brisk pace without indulging in distracting tangents. Several of the pieces sound suspiciously similar in terms of design, but again, with the terse running time it’s hardly a problem. Throughout, Lehman succeeds in blending an intellectual mien with a visceral one, once again proving the fallacy of absolutes when it comes music’s effects on mind and body. In its own peculiar way, this program could easily be considered a dance album.
~ Derek Taylor
Posted by derek on November 19, 2007 8:57 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................