Vancouver’s premier chamber jazz trio, Waxwing, featuring Peggy Lee (cello), Tony Wilson (guitar, harmonica, kalimba, ektara etc.) and Jon Bentley (tenor/soprano sax, tank drum, percussion, synths and bells), deliver Flicker Down, their second release on Songlines.
This is bold, exciting, fervent, often daring, but always eminently listenable jazz. Formed in 2006, the collective makes elegant, beautifully textured music while developing their own compositions and in short improvs.
With a wealth of experience, Waxwing’s sophomore Songlines release follows 2015’s A Bowl Of Sixty Taxidermists, and is similar in its combination of delicacy and strength. Often tinged with tenderness or nostalgia, with a reflective kind of lyricism, the music is familiar, but be prepared also for the unexpected as these well-crafted pieces move though different forms and emotional states.
Peggy Lee is one of Canada’s most celebrated cellists and jazz composers - her most recent large ensemble release, Echo Painting (Songlines - 2018) received rave reviews both nationally and internationally. Alongside the supreme talents of Bentley and Wilson, the trio have delivered an album which will appeal to fans of Wayne Horvitz’s chamber groups and Jimmy Giuffre.
Writing for The New York Times, Nate Chinen, said: “Elegant and bittersweet… The original compositions, by each of the three band members, accommodate fluttery abstraction as well as glowing consonance. Everything - the shifting interplay, the shape of the tunes, the mood - communicates a sense of proportion.”
While All About Jazz’s Dan Bilawsky wrote: “There’s absolutely no way to know what’s coming next, as free jazz raves and folkish thoughts make nice together... all three musicians perform as one without losing a bit of their identities.”
TRACKS
Flicker Down
On This Day
Fweeo Walks By
Your Bet
Time Waited
A Day’s Life
Montbretia Gates
Highway Of Tears
Birds In Cages
Crossing Paths
Joe's Theme
Breathe
Invisible Something
Just Saying
Cloaks Of Coax
Peace For Animeek
Chasing The End
Parasite
