Max Kutner - High Flavors (2023) [Hi-Res]

Max Kutner is something like a guitarist-plus on High Flavors, an album recorded just around the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic with trumpet player Eli Asher, saxophonist Michael Eaton, bassist Kurt Kotheimer, and drummer Colin Hinton. As usual for Kutner, the music pulls from his deep well of jazz, synth funk, and prog rock, with a warm humor that shaves away any pretense associated with those genres (for the purposes of this review, assume genre is a thing—for the purposes of enjoyment, there is no genre only music). Throughout the album, layers of overdubs and samples slot in and out of the tracks (with, as the liner notes mention, “A High Point of Low Culture” highlighting Kutner’s grandfather on saxophone). Around the halfway mark of opener “Deramping,” Kutner, Asher, and Eaton start in on collectively melting faces. The group has more surface jazz markers than Editrix or Ahleuchatistas, occasionally dropping into all-out swing or gutbucket blues territory. Like Eisenberg and Parish, Kutner has a kind of infectious, fearless joy that comes blazingly through.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Max Kutner - Deramping (5:46)
1.02 - Max Kutner - A High Point of Low Culture (4:22)
1.03 - Max Kutner - Infinity Has No Center (5:42)
1.04 - Max Kutner - In Want of an Interpolative Escape Machine (6:10)
1.05 - Max Kutner - Struggling Sometimes (4:32)
1.06 - Max Kutner - Flavors Hook Kids (5:36)
1.07 - Max Kutner - Towers Collapsing (3:31)
1.08 - Max Kutner - Less a Moral Lesson (6:53)