The Big Room (Smoke Sessions)
Joe Farnsworth
Released July 25, 2025
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
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On THE BIG ROOM, drummer JOE FARNSWORTH leads an intergenerational sextet into a place of transcendent creativity and imagination. The album features a stellar cast of player/composers blending modern masters and rising stars: trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, saxophonist Sarah Hanahan, vibraphonist Joel Ross, pianist Emmet Cohen, and bassist Yasushi Nakamura.
The title references a concept that Farnsworth heard about for years from some of the legendary masters that he has counted as mentors and collaborators—artists like Max Roach, Jackie McLean, and Ron Carter. “The Big Room isn’t a place,” Farnsworth relates, “but a spiritual dimension, a vast, wide-open terrain that only the most gifted of artists could reach. It’s a place where all of the discipline, rules, and language that a musician spends a lifetime mastering suddenly fade, and pure, transcendent creation can occur.
Long associated with dyed-in-the-wool tradition, Farnsworth hasn’t departed entirely from his roots. But in recent years, he’s stretched the tether much further and now has assembled a gifted and adventurous band able to forge its own pathway to that elusive realm.
THE BIG ROOM follows the lead of Farnsworth’s previous Smoke Sessions release, IN WHAT DIRECTION ARE YOU HEADED?, which marked a change from the drummer’s longstanding history of working with his musical idols – a remarkable list of greats that includes McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Harold Mabern, Horace Silver, Benny Golson, Cedar Walton, Barry Harris, Curtis Fuller, George Coleman, Johnny Griffin, Lou Donaldson, Cecil Payne, Kenny Barron, and others – instead working with a cast of peers and younger musicians that included Kurt Rosenwinkel and Immanuel Wilkins. While the drummer and bandleader hasn’t departed entirely from his roots, he has now assembled a gifted and adventurous band that continues his desire to expand his music.
One of the artists who has joined Farnsworth frequently over the last few years is Sarah Hanahan, a dazzlingly gifted saxophonist named among the first class of “Youngbloods” by NPR’s Jazz Night in America, alongside such up-and-coming greats as Immanuel Wilkins and Samara Joy. The drummer was equally inspired by his collaborations with Emmet Cohen, whose astounding piano skills are more than matched by his indefatigable spirit.
Farnsworth had never worked with Joel Ross prior to inviting him to join the band for this session, but knew the young vibraphonist would add a singular spark to the music. He’d worked often with Yasushi Nakamura, including in trio settings with Cohen, and Jeremy Pelt’s well-established mastery provided the essential final ingredient for this superb ensemble.
Assembling a band of composer-performers, Farnsworth invited each member to contribute compositions to the repertoire for the album. Hanahan leads off the proceedings with the blistering, Coltrane-inspired “Continuance,” which showcases the sextet at its most combustible. Ross’ “What Am I Waiting For?” swings the pendulum to the opposite extreme for a pensive, dream-like ballad. Jeremy Pelt’s contribution here is the swaggering blues “All Said and Done,” its title as assertive and definitive as its swing.
The title track takes a different turn from the expected for Farnsworth, an exploratory, free-ranging duo between the drummer and Ross. Farnsworth grew up playing duos with his saxophonist brother, then later at school with Eric Alexander and on stage with Pharoah Sanders. Unbeknownst to him, Ross had spent his formative years doing the same with his own brother, a drummer. “It wasn’t based on anything but what we were feeling right then and there,” Farnsworth says.
The duo is followed by Ross’ second composition, the striking burner “Radical.” The album’s sole standard comes in the form of an achingly beautiful “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which shines the spotlight on Pelt’s gorgeous emotionality. Farnsworth sets the breakneck pace for Cohen’s rollicking “You Already Know” before closing the set with his own “Prime Time,” a tasty exercise in “Sidewinder”-style groove akin to the funky antic that the drummer would get up to with Mabern.
“Harold Mabern is always with me,” he says. “He taught me the discipline that you need underneath the freedom. He is such a massive part of the foundation of my playing that whenever I make a record, he’ll be represented on it.”
“So many of the masters are no longer on Earth,” he says, pointing to three of his closest collaborators—Tyner, Sanders, and Mabern—all of whom have passed away over the last several years. “I decided it was time to start playing with younger people, like Art Blakey and Cedar Walton did. They can inspire you and change the way you play. I can be free to be more myself.”
Track Listing:
1. Continuance 06:20
2. What Am I Waiting For? 04:57
3. All Said and Done 06:17
4. The Big Room 03:33
5. Radical 07:10
6. I Fall in Love Too Easily 05:35
7. You Already Know 06:17
8. Prime Time 03:54
Personnel:
Jeremy Pelt: trumpet
Sarah Hanahan: alto saxophone
Joel Ross: vibraphone
Emmet Cohen: piano
Yasushi Nakamura: bass
Joe Farnsworth: drums
Recorded January 23, 2025, at a “Daylight Session,” SMOKE Jazz Club, NYC
Produced by Paul Stache & Damon Smith
Recorded by Paul Stache & Richard Bernard
Mixed by Chris Allen & Paul Stache
Mastered by Chris Allen
Photography by Osmel Portuondo Azcuy
Photography assisted by Nailé Piñeiro Aguila & Fabio Roman Garcia
Executive Producers: Paul Stache & Molly Johnson
Review:
Nobody reading this review needs me to tell them that drummer Joe Farnsworth has made an album of straightahead, hard-driving swing. Moreover, the names that appear on The Big Room’s cover below Farnsworth’s — trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, altoist Sarah Hanahan, vibist Joel Ross, pianist Emmet Cohen and bassist Yasushi Nakamura — guarantee it’ll be a barn burner.
What you really want to know is how they all sound when they come together. Let’s just say it’s a good thing this is a studio record. The level of energy and excitement they generate would be dangerous in a crowded club.
That doesn’t just apply on the uptempo numbers. Of course, those would be enough. The screaming relay race that Cohen, Pelt, Ross Hanahan and Farnsworth run on “You Already Know” is alone worth the price of admission. (That’s to say nothing of “Radical’s” slow-burn friction.) It’s how they turn up the heat while the velocity’s down that truly makes the album. Consider “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” Pelt leading the melody over Ross and the rhythm section, the latter characterized by Farnsworth’s punctilious brushwork. It’s as tender and vulnerable as any jazz reading of the Styne-Cahn ballad, yet, seemingly unconsciously, when the bridge arrives everyone puts just a hint more muscle into their line. Ross, then Cohen, channel that infinitesimal oomph into suddenly all-but-jaunty solos. This isn’t repeated on the date’s other ballad, “What Am I Waiting For” — but there’s an explosive tension in Pelt and Hanahan’s controlled call-and-response; it feels like it could burst at any moment.
Steam also rises from the medium-tempo “All Said And Done,” Ross submitting a particularly fine solo. It turns to smoke on the boogaloo closer “Prime Time,” where it’s Hanahan who shines brightest, with Cohen not far behind. The Big Room simply never lets up.
Michael J. West (DownBeat)
