
Color of Noize (Blue Note)
Derrick Hodge
Released June 26, 2020
JAZZ FM 25 Best Jazz Albums of 2020
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2020
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lNhIRnmqEbJZpVd0pnZbxcCOdpovvMC2c
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4eARmd0GWRsEMrodDDHkug?si=NKg4JUr_RWi1KqUl_5pIgA
About:
With his third record, Derrick Hodge unleashes his freest work yet. Color of Noize is the band, the concept, and the album, and if that name evokes more questions than answers for you, then you’re reading it right. The title is perfectly wide-open and inquisitive for a composer, bandleader, and bassist (etc.) with Hodge’s history. He’s been a go-to collaborator for Robert Glasper, Maxwell, Terence Blanchard, and Common alike — and played on GRAMMY-winning albums by all four. He’s helped shape striking sounds in producing albums by Blue Note labelmates Kendrick Scott and James Francies, and teamed with Quincy Jones to co-produce an album by Justin Kauflin on Jones’ label Qwest. He’s brought subtly subversive concepts to world-class orchestras in Atlanta, Chicago, and D.C., and new ideas to the Monterey Jazz Festival as a 2019 artist-in-residence. R+R=NOW is only the most recent supergroup he’s co-founded. If there’s one takeaway to be had from his career, it’s this: you can put Hodge in a band — any band — but you can’t put him in a box.
Color of Noize is in many ways a culmination of all that, and also completely separate. While the music heard here indeed reflects a melting pot of influence and experience — a primordial soup of jazz flow, hip-hop groove, soulful depth, spiritual heft, and creative fire — the sound is best described in more abstract terms. As Hodge lays it out: “It’s the contrast, it’s the beauty, it’s the chaos, it’s the freedom — all of that.” This album also includes a few firsts. It’s the first Hodge record to use a live band throughout. It was that band’s first time playing together, and their first time hearing the songs Hodge wrote for their session. It was also Hodge’s first time bringing in a co-producer, who happened to be Blue Note president Don Was himself.
“It was powerful to see this group of young, brilliant improvisers set up in a circle at Hollywood’s historic United Studio A,” says Was. “It felt like a throwback to what it might have been like on the floor of a Blue Note session at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in the mid-sixties. These were ‘old school’ sessions yielding modern music so forward-looking and visionary that there is no existing genre within which to categorize it.”
“Don has this selflessness where he really wants to get to the root of what makes a musician tick and what’s pushing them in the moment,” says Hodge, who flew out to Los Angeles from his home in Denver to record. “It felt invaluable to have someone like that in my corner for a project like this, to help see everything through a different lens.” That goes to the heart of the Color of Noize concept — an intentionally broad thing meant to embrace the fluidity of sound and inspire a sense of collective ownership over that sound’s development and interpretation. “It’s an idea I feel is really relevant to our time,” Hodge says. “A new artistic heartbeat that’s about acceptance. It all relates to the spirit of now, not overly thinking, and moving forward.”
That’s why Hodge formed a brand-new group, and often just played them a quick run-through of each song on piano before letting them rip. Of course, it took a special crew to bring Color of Noize to life: Jahari Stampley and Michael Aaberg on keys, Mike Mitchell and Justin Tyson on drums, and DJ Jahi Sundance on turntables, with Hodge supplying bass, keys, guitar, and voice. Jump ahead to the title track, an honest-to-god first take, to get a feel for their collective might. “Color of Noize,” the song, is a shimmering, skittering masterwork where slowly shifting tones stretch across a flurry of constantly exploding percussion. “You can hear the drummers going for blood,” says Hodge. “I just wanted everyone to trust their own artistry. They did.”
In an outfit whose credits run a mile long and cross countless genres, Stampley stands out. The 18-year-old was brought in based off of a single short YouTube clip Glasper sent Hodge. This was his first studio recording ever — proof that, as Hodge says, “We’re putting something on the line here.” That anything-can-happen feeling courses through Color of Noize. Opener “The Cost” starts on a mellow drift before a dam bursts and piano pours out. “Not Right Now” finds funk groove and classical poise occupying the same pocket. “You Could Have Stayed” is a pillowy dream of bowed bass and humming organ. And a particularly swung cover of Wayne Shorter’s “Fall” lands between one song that evokes Flying Lotus’ rich electronica (“19”), and another that brings to mind the lonesome digitized folk of Bon Iver (“Looking at You”).
While most of Color of Noize was captured in two studio days, the foundation of “Looking at You” is a piece Hodge recorded via phone at home, sitting at the 1902 Ludwig upright where these songs began. “I wanted people to feel like they’re in the room with me, imagining,” he says. That piano also appears on “Little Tone Poem” along with his family, continuing a Hodge tradition of working raw snippets of his life into his albums despite how different each one has been, from 2013’s guest-packed Live Today to 2016’s almost entirely solo The Second to this live band set. But of course, eclecticism has been a constant too, going as far back as Hodge can remember: his mother used to play him a different radio station each night before bed.
Growing up in Philadelphia and nearby Willingboro, New Jersey, Hodge moved between two different hotbeds of talent, taking all the music classes he could while also sitting in with local players (Color of Noize’s double drums/double keys approach was inspired by those informal, inclusive sessions). As he wrapped things up at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music, he was already cutting his teeth in Philly’s burgeoning neo-soul scene, not to mention playing various shades of jazz in the Mulgrew Miller Trio. Although the Color of Noize concept is much bigger than one man, it’s impossible not to hear all of Hodge’s history come to bear on a song like “Heartbeats,” which sounds as carefully composed as it does instinctive and off-the cuff.
Before the album comes to a close, we get “New Day,” where Hodge breaks out the acoustic guitar and coos, “Yeah, we can talk about it.” The lyric feels like a promise to the listener — an invitation to join the conversation. But the project’s openhearted spirit is best heard on the last song, Stampley’s solo piano version of “You Could Have Stayed.” When the young man first arrived at the studio, Hodge was secretly running tape. As a trial run, Hodge played the song once, then left Stampley to try it out. This is that performance, made within 15 minutes of their meeting. It’s gorgeous, and hugely symbolic. Color of Noize began with Hodge, but it ends on the next generation. As Hodge puts it, “Ultimately this is y’all music. Take it, and run with it.”
Track Listing:
1. The Cost (Derrick Hodge) 04:41
2. Not Right Now (Derrick Hodge) 06:26
3. Little Tone Poem (Derrick Hodge) 01:17
4. You Could Have Stayed (Derrick Hodge) 04:44
5. Color of Noize (Derrick Hodge) 07:02
6. 19 (Derrick Hodge) 04:59
7. Fall (Wayne Shorter) 06:26
8. Looking at You (Derrick Hodge) 05:13
9. Heartbeats (Derrick Hodge) 03:32
10. New Day (Derrick Hodge) 05:32
11. You Could Have Stayed (Derrick Hodge) featuring Jahari Stampley 02:58
Personnel:
Derrick Hodge: electric bass, acoustic bass, fretless bass, piano, keyboards, body percussion, voice
Justin Tyson: drums (1-7, 9-10)
Michael Mitchell: drums (1-2, 4-10)
Jahari Stampley: piano, organ
Michael Aaberg: synthesizer, keyboards
DJ Jahi Sundance: turntables (1, 5)
Christian Hodge, Elijah Hodge and Josephine Hodge: voice (3)
Recorded at Brooklyn Recording Studio, Brooklyn, NY; Colour of Noize Studio, Derver; United Recording Studios, Hollywood, CA
Produced by Derrick Hodge, Don Was
Recorded and Mixed by Qmillion
Assistant recording: Wesley Seidman
Additional Recording: Andrew Taub, Derrick Hodge
Mastered by Ian Sefchick
Photography by Ryan Landell
Artwork by J. T. Liss
Package Design: Meat And Potatoes, Inc.
Review:
Derrick Hodge is a contemporary musical renaissance man. A top-flight bassist known for his core membership in the Robert Glasper Experiment, he is also a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer who has worked with everyone from Common and Terence Blanchard to Maxwell, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Gretchen Parlato. Color of Noize is at once the title of his third album and the name of his band, comprised of pianist/organist Jahari Stampley, keyboardist and synth player Michael Aaberg, drummers Mike Michell and Justin Tyson, and DJ Jahi Sundance on turntables. Hodge plays bass, guitar, keys, and sings. He co-produced the set with Don Was.
Color of Noize is the first time Hodge has worked with an outside producer. Cut live in studio, his musicians encountered the music only when they were about to record it; improvised moments are abundant here. Hodge doesn’t meld genres, he blurs them in an exotic, resonant, uplifting music of his own. Groove and flow become multivalent expressions of a single creative voice through instrumental hip-hop, contemporary jazz, indie rock, and soul; they emerge to offer emotional depth and spiritual heft.
“The Cost” opens with sampled, fragmented voices hovering above fretless bass, turntables, reverb, wafting organ, and lithe piano, grooving through the studio haze in a thunderous crescendo with lightning-fast breaks and vamps that bind them. First single “Not Right Now” whispers in with hip-hop beats before Hodge’s economical bassline becomes the tune’s melodic voice. When the band enters, they embellish and expand the harmonic ideas as he improvises. Hodge plays upright bass arco-style alongside his electric on “You Could Have Stayed,” a soulful ballad that simultaneously evokes R&B and sweet Southern gospel. Commencing quietly as a sparse harmonic notion, organ swells and junglist drumming escalate the tempo as declamatory synths create a maelstrom for furious bass soloing. Second single “Heartbeats” seemingly appears from the ether with reverbed tom-tom and a hummable bassline tenderly adorned by piano and electronics. It foreshadows “Brand New Day,” the souled-out acoustic guitar jam driven by a hovering Hammond B-3 to support Hodge’s singing, as do piano and an elegantly hushed kick drum. His elegantly distorted bass solo breaks it open to impart emotional, spiritual, and carnal truth. Color of Noize pushes past Hodge’s earlier albums. It’s a fully realized project that will appeal to any listener willing to embrace its spontaneity. Even in its rare, chaotic, cascading moments, the album expresses a wholeness most modern musicians are incapable to summon. Hodge is an accommodating, even generous, musical explorer and therefore gets the max from his material, production, playing, and sidemen. Based on its quality, Hodge takes his place in the company of a few visionary peers such as Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke, Victor Wooten, and the late Mick Karn.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)