George Dulin Disband - Ride of Your Life

Cadence Jazz

Blame it on Bill Evans if you must, but few ensemble combinations are as pervasive in jazz as the piano trio. Saying something fresh with the format is frequently an exercise in futility. So much so that many outfits content themselves with safely regurgitating the past. George Dulin and his colleagues in Disband appear acutely aware of the conundrum. Influenced indirectly by the Tristano School, their tack is decidedly deconstructionist. Dulin wryly refers to the cobbled creations as “de-rangements”. Titles like “Ella’s Night Light” and “I Forgot April” give easy clues to the identities of source tunes, the second piece featuring a hilarious instance of title echoing the band’s fallibility. As engaging as these retoolings are, it’s the musicianship of the three that truly carries the album. Producer Bob Rusch likens Dulin’s keyboard attack to an amalgam of Bud Powell and Don Pullen and it strikes me as an apt one. There’s energy to burn in his bright and dancing patterns that reflects academic encounters with George Garzone and Cecil Taylor. Bassist Danny Zanker and drummer Take Toriyama have similar perspiration-producing relationships with their instruments. The resulting interplay between the three is often thrillingly fleet and free of stasis.

In a roundabout way, Dulin’s work here reminds me of Bobby Timmons, not in sound, but in strategy. On mid-60s Prestige sides like Little Barefoot Soul and Chun-King, Timmons sought to integrate populist elements of gospel, blues and soul into his music and devised an earthy rhythmic hybrid that sadly ended up failing to sell the requisite units. Dulin and his crew take a similar boundary-dissolving approach. “Stingray Road” works off a tight groove and rock-inflected backbeat while “Cerebral Dongnosh” threads in a tone-row and Klezmer motif. The solo “’Round Midnight” and trio-rendered “Seawatch” are flush with romantic expressionism that finds Dulin acknowledging the Evans monolith, but not bowing beneath its shadow. “F.M. Downward Spiral” radically revamps “Softly As in a Morning Sunrise” with a downhill racer’s tempo and rich grist for improvisation, particularly in the combustive cross-rhythms that cascade from Toriyama’s corner. The session carries a posthumous dedication to the drummer who passed away in the spring of 2007. Jordan Perlson replaces him on several pieces that constitute Dulin’s demo for the 2006 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition, a contest that earned him a semifinalist standing. Dulin’s abilities are still developing, but this debut effort denotes a talent definitely deserving of wider recognition.