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Czech double bass virtuoso and composer Miroslav Vitous must by now have shrugged off any residual irritation about the oft-circulated fact that he was a founding member of the legendary jazz-rock fusion band Weather Report in 1970. Vitous’s dislike of the band’s drift away from improv toward electric music and popular global funk saw him leave as their star was rising. His CV would turn out just fine: Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Jan Garbarek, John Surman and Jack DeJohnette were among his many classy playing partners. Seven years in the making, with Vitous now 78, Mountain Call reflects a lifetime’s immersion in classical music alongside jazz, and the balance of spontaneity, nuance and cinematic atmospherics that offered him.
Across multiple improv dialogues and two suites (all short, Vitous being no fan of loquacity), the set prominently features DeJohnette, who died in October, with Esperanza Spalding, saxophonist Bob Mintzer and the phenomenal French clarinettist Michel Portal, who died in February. Eight duo tracks for Vitous and Portal (mostly all-improvised) are worth the album alone, for their ever-shifting mix of mellow lyricism and challenging curiosity. In four improvisations on a standard clarinet, Portal segues graceful swoops, plaintive queries and staccato punctuation against Vitous’s turbulent undercurrent of muscular plucked runs and percussive accents. On bass clarinet, the Frenchman sweeps from resonant deep sounds to breathtaking glissando ascents hurtling to the upper register.
Vitous’s duets with DeJohnette’s hustling drumming are also highlights (notably on Fulfillment as they pursue each other through the Czech National Symphony Orchestra’s misty harmonies), as are Spalding’s vocals on the Rhapsody suite, gliding between a standards-singer’s care for lyrics, sax-mimicking wordless sounds, soulful soliloquies on the percussion-rich Africa and fluid contrapuntal lines with terrific, though little-known, hard boppish saxophonist Gary Campbell. Mountain Call could hardly be a more personal contemporary music chronicle from an unflinching one-off.
Also out this month
Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note) is the first of a three-volume set from that iconic New York club that confirms how powerfully and perceptively gospel/post-bop saxophonist Wilkins balances jazz past, present and future, notably on an impassioned account of Alice Coltrane’s haunting Charanam. The unique Franco-Syrian flute improviser and composer Naïssam Jalal releases Landscapes of Eternity (Les Couleurs du Son), the rich result of her deep study of Hindustani traditions and solo travels in north India. Tears in Delhi’s Fog epitomises Jalal’s discoveries through her effortlessly flexible voice, the warmth and audacity of her improvisations and the punch of a traditional Indian and jazzily westernised lineup. And the legacy of cult 1960s psychedelic/rock group Soft Machine evolves on Thirteen (Dyad), a mix of psych-rock, blues-to-free guitar (the great John Etheridge, a Softs stalwart for half a century), ferocious sax-playing (Theo Travis) and the frontier-busting drumming of newcomer Asaf Sirkis.
