Tony Malaby's Paloma Recio - Incantation Suite (feat. Ben Monder, Eivind Opsvik & Nasheet Waits) (2016)

One critic said it all: if someone like Joe Lovano is the jazz equivalent to The Beatles, than Tony Malaby’s rock analogy are The Rolling Stones. What does that mean? Simple, it means that the saxophonist and composer leading the band Paloma Recio is a wild card, always doing what you don’t expect him to do. If you still think that categories like “mainstream” and “avant-garde” are at war with each other, think again. To Malaby, they’re two sides of the same coin or not even that: he brings the jazz tradition to an approach committed to open form and he deals experimentally with history, his own history as a first generation Mexican-American born. His band with Ben Monder, Eivind Opsvik and Nasheet Waits play Hyspanic-tinged melodies with an African-American envelope, but preferring to use graphic notation instead of conventional scores. This way, he doesn’t define anything too much and he frees harmony and improvisation from fixed constraints. The music sounds fresh, alive and vibrant, new but with deep roots in jazz soil. And yes, “Incantation Suite” is very different from the homonymous CD by the quartet, released in 2009: the future touched it. Let it touch you too.