Septet (Stones Throw Records)
John Carroll Kirby
Released June 25, 2021
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2021
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lTvtIzZRrUNnaXaP8eCx_5PAo5N8gT0Yc
Spotify:
About:
Los Angeles-based composer, producer, and pianist John Carroll Kirby, who has made a strong name for himself over the last several years collaborating with everyone from Solange (produced three tracks on A Seat At The Table, and featured on When I Get Home), and Blood Orange, to Frank Ocean, Miley Cyrus and many others. On top of these high-profile collaborative works, Kirby has also released a number of incredible albums on his own via the Stones Throw label, and he returns with arguably his best album to date, titled Septet.
Featuring eight original compositions and three additional dub versions, this brilliant new album record together Kirby’s synth and keyboard wizardry with cosmic melodies, jazz-funk grooves, and heavily layered horns and percussion rhythms. The album was recorded live, and certainly has a slightly 70s-era jazz fusion loose energy, with each track taking on it’s own “musical-life” in the moment it was performed.
As the self-describing title suggests, this seven-musician session features Kirby on keys, and he is joined by six other superb cast of musicians including Tracy Wannomae on woodwinds, Logan Hone on woodwinds, Nick Mancini on vibraphone, John Paul Maramba on bass, David Leach on percussion, and Deantoni Parks on drums.
From ambient electronic music to neo-soul and jazz, over the last several years, Kirby has shown his wide ranging diversity as both a musician and composer, and this incredible new album continues to expand on those depths and take his music to new orbits and dimensions. There’s no doubt that this double-LP sis one of the best albums of 2021, and should make it’s way onto many of those year-end lists.
Track Listing:
1. Rainmaker 07:42 video
2. P64 By My Side 04:11
3. Sensing Not Seeing 05:33
4. Swallow Tail 03:48
5. Weep 04:49
6. Jubilee Horns 07:00
7. The Quest of Chico Hamilton 04:28
8. Nucleo 09:02
Personnel:
John Paul Maramba: bass
Deantoni Parks: drums
John Carroll Kirby: keyboards
Nick Mancini: mallets
David Leach: percussion
Logan Hone, Tracy Wannomae: woodwinds
Recorded at 6 Sound, Highland Park
Producer: John Carroll Kirby
Mixing and Additional Production: Tony Buchen
Mastering: Jake Viator
Engineering: Pierre De Reader
Cut by Josh Bonati
Photos by Eddie Chacon
Design: Justin Sloane
Review:
John Carroll Kirby’s earlier releases under his full name, starting in 2017 and extending to his pair of Stones Throw albums in 2020, are mostly solitary recordings evincing his flair for keyboard compositions that soothe and stimulate with little assistance. For his third Stones Throw offering Septet, he works in a setting that is actually more familiar to him, at least going by his vast session work from the aughts onward. While everything here was written and produced by Kirby, Septet was indeed cut by a group of seven, featuring Deantoni Parks (drums), David Leach (percussion), John Paul Maramba (bass), Nick Mancini (mallets), and Tracy Wannomae and Logan Hone (both on woodwinds). Some pieces advance the globetrotting instrumental avant-pop mode Kirby has explored on Travel and My Garden. Remarkably, the most effective moments in this vein occur when the leader assumes a background position, lending synthesizer shading and warped effects as mallets and flute link and skip at the fore of “P64 by My Side.” For the most part, this is a jazz date — an inviting and beatific one that frequently evokes classic ’70s jazz-funk. “Swallow Tail” is as delightfully lazing and lapping as Harvey Mason’s “Modaji.” Kirby’s synthesizer curlicues never detract from the easy groove. Maramba buoyantly kick-starts “Sensing Not Seeing” like it could be an update of Deodato’s “Skyscrapers,” but it settles into something more akin to Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock, evoking lower flight over a forest, held aloft by Mancini’s ceaseless riffing. Kirby scarcely draws attention to himself, but when he does — most prominently on “Weep” and “The Quest of Chico Hamilton” — he induces facial expressions that are part grin, part grimace, all pleasure. At the proper end that precedes three bonus dub versions, “Nucleo (Boy from the Prebiotic Birth)” rides in on a low-slung polyrhythmic gallop with some of the players not so much taking solos as occasionally bubbling up from the mix. So idyllic is its effect that nobody could have been faulted for disregarding the vocal cue to stop.
Andy Kellman (AllMusic)
