One of the supreme pleasures of my life is hearing music for the first time. That all-important first-listen can only happen once. To make matters even more dramatic, I purposely do not want to have any inkling whatsoever what I am about to hear. The instantaneous shock-of-recognition that accompanies, for instance, a riveting new cover version of an old favorite song, can keep me enthralled and talking about it for days on end to friends and family. They're used to it. Some of them are sick of it. So I write. The following four CDs by Melissa Aldana, Jon Stickley, Cristian Perez and Bastian Stein made me smile. They're all keepers.
In 2014, I fell in love with the big tenor sax tone of the self-titled Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio. Here was a gal who blew from the heart! Now she's Back Home (Wommusic), still Crashing, and still with that deep satisfying sound that a tenor sax can achieve. In Aldana's mouth, the sax sounds human. Maybe it isn't mixed as up front as on the debut, but here it meshes with drummer Jochen Rueckert and bassist Pablo Menares for more of a band sound. Maybe that's because Aldana recorded her parts alone in a room wearing headphones the last time. Now the band is all together to achieve an organic jam-packed structure of eight originals and one translucent cover of Kurt Weill's "My Ship" (written for the 1941 Broadway musical play, "Lady In The Dark.") Aldana left her native Chile nine years ago to worship at the church of Sonny Rollins. The whole idea of her piano-less/guitar-less (in other words, chord-less) trio is pure Rollins. She's an apt student and has enough potential to possibly carry that torch someday.
Meet Victor. It's the name of German trumpeter Bastian Stein's Pirouet Records CD with German tenor sax man Johannes Enders, 49, British bassist Phil Donkin, 36, and British drummer James Maddren, 29. Note no piano or guitar. The trumpet/sax front line has no net and no chords to fall back on. The follow-up to his impressive 2013 Diegesis debut, Victor, with its two-woodwind sound, is free, honest and daring. Stein, born in 1983 Germany and raised in Vienna, received his musical training in Amsterdam and New York. Enders is his perfect foil. They engage in numerous sax/trumpet dialogues and also have moments of crystalline solo clarity with nothing but Maddren's empathetic drums whisking away underneath on seven Stein originals and one classical cover: "Der Abschied" which closes the proceedings on a decidedly high-brow note. (It's an excerpt from "Das Lied Von Der Erde" by Gustav Mahler [1860-1911]. Well done, gentlemen!
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