On most of his recent albums, iconic jazz saxophonist Ivo Perelman has flirted with the avant-garde, but never fully committed. Or, as I like to put it, he’s been free jazz adjacent, not full-on free jazz.
It’s the difference between, say, John Coltrane’s Sun Ship and his Live In Japan.
But on Oxygen (digital), on which Perelman collaborates with bari saxophonist Ken Vandermark and trombone player Joe McPhee, this threesome often get super weird and out there in a way that will annoy more traditional jazz heads, but delight those who don’t mind when things get good and noisy.
Ken Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Ivo Perelman
Recorded at Brooklyn’s Parkwest Studios in December of 2021, Oxygen is not the first time these three have collaborated, just the first time they’ve all worked together at the same time. In 2022, Perelman released a 12-disc set called Reed Rapture In Brooklyn, on which he played with a dozen different musicians in a duo setting, including Vandermark and McPhee, while those two have collaborated on multiple albums, including (but not limited to) A Meeting In Chicago with bassist Kent Kessler, Invitation To A Dream with pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, and Impressions Of Po Music with Ken Vandermark’s Topology Nonet.
Though it’s clear from listening to Oxygen than their collective unfamiliarity (relatively speaking) is not a problem.
The album opens with the titular track, a slow burner that finds these three slowly easing into it, almost tenuously. But as it progresses, it steadily builds and then ebbs, flirting with free jazz noisiness but never quite getting there.
But they do get there, and further, on Oxygen‘s second track, “Carbon,” which opens with some percussive sounds that are, dare I say, kind of funky, over which they add some carefully placed bursts of horns. And things get even wilder in the middle, when they add sounds that made me think the studio wasn’t soundproofed, and that a big wind storm had hit Brooklyn, which scared these three into playing quickly and nervously. It’s an approach that continues even after the winds die down, though eventually things get noisy and aggressive, like they’re pissed there’s no more storm.
The weirdness continues in Oxygen‘s next track, “Sulfur,” which has someone growling and moaning and then chanting, which made me wonder if they were turning into a were-monk (don’t ask). This was followed by more percussive sound effects and quick bursts of horn sounds, which eventually find the threesome in a combative mood, like they’re yelling at each other but through their horns, though they do eventually get to a point where they take turns “yelling.”
Oxygen calms down, relatively speaking, for the next song, “Phosphorus,” if by “calm” you mean “goes back to the free jazz adjacent-sound improvs of the title track.” It still occasionally flirts with the noisy, especially towards the end, when it sounds like someone is blowing his horn a little too hard, but compared to “Carbon” and “Sulfur,” it’s downright nominal.
This brings us to “Nitrogen,” Oxygen’s penultimate song (and shortest at 5:06). It’s also the moodiest and most atmospheric, as the three all play slow and low, with their drawn-out notes making for a more textural sound than any of the previous tracks. And yet, the track works well in context, especially leading up to…
“Hydrogen,” which ends Oxygen by having the three get increasingly agitated, with busts of horns that make it sound like they’re back arguing about something. Though they eventually calm down, and even sound a little pensive, only to have things start to get noisy and upity around the middle, and eventually slow down and get moody as the song, and the album, comes to a close.
In the end,
Oxygen is easily the most out-there album Perelman has made in recent memory…and that’s saying something. How much you’ll enjoy it, obviously, depends on how out there you want to go.
SCORE: 7.5/10
