BrhyM, Bruce Hornsby & yMusic - Deep Sea Vents (2024) Hi Res

Serial moving target Bruce Hornsby indulges his love of underwater worlds in a collaboration with yMusic, a six-member classical/pop chamber group animated by an equally adventurous spirit. The pianist from the Tidewater region of Virginia has in recent years added more classical players and flexibilities to his music. yMusic was featured throughout Hornsby's Absolute Zero in 2019 and BrhyM collects the work of an even earlier alliance between the pair: impromptu encores performed at the 2016 Eaux Claires festival in Wisconsin. These short, frisky evocations of water in its many forms flow with the exuberance of its subject.

"Platypus Wow" features strings and horns mimicking the waddling motion of the titular animal. In the Moby Dick-inspired "The Wild Whaling Life," clarinet and strings combine to create whale sounds and a playful piping rhythm that pulses behind Hornsby's chunky lyrics ("A mystical, mystic ocean at my fee/ I slot a barrel stave when singing a/ Mordant stave of psalmody/ Psalmody, singing to the sea") which are willfully intricate and oblique throughout but never fully annoying. Hornsby opens "Phase Change" lamenting, "Sitting, sitting at the bar as my beer glass starts to cry" before spinning out a fantasy about water in its various states. "I wiped a tear off my cheek, sympathetic with the glass/ Feelings are much more than a liquid from a cooling glass/ The tears I hear are hormone-driven water from some ducts/ It happens all the time when a happy couple self-destructs," he continues.

This collaboration soars in the touching melody of "Foreign Sounds," the unlikely saga of a baby clownfish who, at the mercy of pollution, "may be doomed to wander the sea alone." The song hints at larger issues, broadening into what Hornsby calls a "a true ballad for the blighted, the heartsick, and the stranded." The single "Deep Blue" easily slides into another facet of his art: spare but genuine bass, drum and keys funk. Reflexively ambidextrous and ever yearning for the new, Hornsby's unpredictable journey strides forward.