Daniel Carter/William Parker/Hamid Drake

Vicente/Dikeman/Parker/Drake
Goes without saying, but it’s got to be said
JCC Records 40

New York bassist William Parker and Chicago drummer Hamid Drake are the Paul Chambers and Art Taylor of 21st Century advanced music. Besides numerous projects on their own they’ve been the rhythm team on sessions from New Orleans to Tel Aviv. Known for collective pulsations as well as fluid invention, the two are featured on Goes without saying, but it’s got to be said, a live Lisbon-recorded session with American-in-Holland tenor saxophonist John Dikeman and local trumpeter Luís Vicente, and six months earlier in a Brooklyn studio, a set with long-time associate multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter.

A unique take on Energy Music, the Lisbon recording is divided into three tracks, with boiling percussion rumbles and throbbing double bass lines filling the gaps as Vicente’s angled trills and Dikeman’s renal sprawls, dissected squeaks and stuttering split tones operate in the foreground. Except for an interlude near the end when Drake chants while playing frame drum, sounds evolve with ferocious dynamics. Easily capable of creating skyscraper-high capillary runs, the trumpeter is equally crafty in his horn’s bottom and middle register, producing orotund and almost opaque tone flutters. Meantime the saxophonist snakes around the program with whistling honks, exaggerated flattement and stretches of intense glossolalia. String-punched raw power, gimbri strums or outlined bowing marks the bassist’s accompaniment to the horns’ conflated twists and turns. Eventually, following that Drake-chanting lull, the four supercharge again. Never losing the narrative thread the bassist and drummer help relax the exposition to a fitting finale following trumpet whinnies and bites and the saxophonist’s seemingly endless nephritic scoops and detonating multiphonics.

There may be one fewer player on Painters Winter, but it’s almost unnoticeable since in the course of five tracks Daniel Carter plays trumpet, alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet and flute. One track features him switching from slippery clarinet trills to Arcadian flute puffs while trading licks with the whorls of color Parker pulls from trombonium. Using the same two horns, but with Parker chiming bass strings and Drake’s cymbal accents added on “Painted Scarf”, Carter creates arrhythmic variations that enlarge the exposition from near-primitivism to distinct modernism. Playing trumpet during “Groove 77”, Carter’s gentling puffs describe a singular color field which preserves the tune’s airiness despite Drake’s hard ruffs and Parker’s mercurial string clanks. Carter’s repertoire of reed split tones, slurs, scoops and smears on either saxophone matches, but also melds with, whatever metrical thumps or resonating slaps the others create. Carter’s mixing of Prez-like tenor sax subtly and later outpouring of energetic reed bites set the scene on “A Curley Russell”, Parker’s composition saluting a bass progenitor. The bassist maintains a steadying string thump with col legno asides throughout and following some reed slurs Drake completes the portrait with thumps and rolls that are typical of the style of Art Blakey, one of Russell’s better-known bosses.

Home and abroad, in quartet or trio, Drake and Parker are part of two more notable discs.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Goes: 1. 1st Sentence 2. 2nd Sentence 3. 3rd Sentence.

Personnel: Goes: Luís Vicente (trumpet); John Dikeman (tenor saxophone); William Parker (bass, gimbri, gralla and wooden flutes) and Hamid Drake (drums, percussion and voice)

Track Listing: Painters: 1. Groove 77 2. Painters Winter 3. Happiness 4. Painted Scarf 5. A Curley Russell

Personnel: Painters: Daniel Carter (trumpet, alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet and flute); William Parker (bass, trombonium, shakuhachi) and Hamid Drake (drums)