Ocelot (577 Records)
Colin Hinton / Cat Toren / Yuma Uesaka
Released March 26, 2021
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2021
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About:
Ocelot – the new Brooklyn-based trio featuring Cat Toren, Yuma Uesaka, and Colin Hinton – presents its irresistibly vivid debut album, via 577 Records.
At a contemplative time for the world, the new Brooklyn-based trio Ocelot makes its debut on record with an album that emphasizes melody and atmosphere, whether the music is meditative or more volatile. This group features award-winning pianist Cat Toren, saxophonist/clarinetist Yuma Uesaka and drummer/percussionist Colin Hinton.
Ocelot represents the culmination of a year’s worth of composing, rehearsing, touring and local gigging for the band – including an October 2019 residency in New Haven, Connecticut, and a tour of the East Coast and Canada that deepened the trio’s chemistry and its approach to the material recorded later that month. Remarkably, Toren was pregnant with her daughter during the entire process, a challenge made easier by the keenly supportive relationships in the band. “We’re three friends who trust each other, converse easily and have tremendous respect for one another,” Toren explains. “Our relationships are the foundation for our interactive discourse, which can vary – we’ve performed concerts that were musically very patient, and we’ve played gigs at bars that were real bangers.”
Track Listing:
1. Daimon II (Colin Hinton) 02:50
2. Factum (Colin Hinton) 10:38
3. Iterations I (Yuma Uesaka) 04:44
4. Post (Yuma Uesaka) 05:43
5. Anemone (Cat Toren) 06:31
6. Contemptuality (Colin Hinton) 10:16
7. Sequestration (Colin Hinton) 08:08
8. Crocus (Cat Toren) 07:14
Personnel:
Yuma Uesaka: tenor saxophone, clarinets (Bb, Bass, Contralto)
Cat Toren: piano, nord
Colin Hinton: drums, percussion, gongs, glockenspiel, vibraphone
Recorded October 20, 2019 at The Bunker Studio (Brooklyn, NY) by Nolan Thies, assisted by Carlos Mora
Edited by Edward Gavitt
Mixed by Eivind Opsvik
Mastered by Brent Lambert
Artwork by Jerry Birchfield, Pale 6, gelatin silver print & plaster, 20”x10”x5”, 2017
Graphic design by Mark Smith
Review:
The eponymous 2021 debut album from the Brooklyn jazz collective Ocelot features the trio’s artful and darkly cinematic improvisational sound. Making up Ocelot are pianist Cat Toren, saxophonist/clarinetist Yuma Uesaka, and drummer/percussionist Colin Hinton. Together, they play a blend of avant-garde jazz and modern classical that balances soft melodies with arresting moments of hypnotic dissonance. The Canadian-born Toren, who won a Juno Award for her work with the quintet Pugs and Crows in 2012, has built a reputation for playing spiritual jazz influenced by ’60s icons like John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, as on her superb 2020 album Scintillating Beauty. While she touches upon that style here, working with Uesaka and Hinton she takes that sound further, pushing her warm, meditative style in an edgy, atonal direction akin to free-leaning players like Cecil Taylor and Myra Melford. The opening “Daimon II” is a dusky piece built around Toren and Uesaka’s spare arpeggios. It’s an eerie track, evoking images of empty rooms full of shadows and memories. Equally haunting is “Contemptuality,” a ballad that sounds like broken glass falling in slow motion. The trio conjure visual sounds throughout the album, as on “Anemone,” where Uesaka’s sax is a breathy moan under the far-off rumble of Hinton’s drums and Toren’s moon-bright piano chords. Similarly, on the Philip Glass-esque “Post,” they play an urgent, repeated two-note phrase like an anxious dinner bell that ends abruptly with long drawn-out notes. The album builds dramatically to “Crocus,” a languorous ballad that lulls you along before exploding with a raging saxophone solo that dissipates into empty paint can drums and a low piano murmur. Ocelot have crafted an engaging debut full of impressionist sound paintings that draw you into their textural spell.
Matt Collar (AllMusic)
