CD review: Michael Formanek, Tomas Fujiwara, Mary Halvorson – Wingbeats – 2024 – In the Land of Thumbscrew: Video, Photos

A few seconds into listening to the new album, the eighth, of the Thumbscrew trio and you find yourself in a surreal world in which every coordinate of time and space applied in music must be abandoned, to witness the free and peculiar dialogue developed and developed between the three creators.

Rhythmic complexity alongside linear melodies, consonant and dissonant timbres, alienating climates in which it is initially difficult to orient oneself.

Immersing yourself in one of their works makes you feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland in contact with the world upside down. Or if you want, as the kind producers of Cuneiform records, the label that has adopted the trio, suggest, twirl in a universe without gravity.

If you accept these premises, you are ready to appreciate “Wingbeats”, just released as the result of a three-week residency at the City of Asylum center in Pittsburgh, a place with which the musicians have, over time, established a special relationship. “This place has allowed the definition of a real work system – they explain. We arrive with our music totally or partially composed and from the first day we start rehearsing with the aim of recording. This has been the process for all the albums after the first.”

The album, composed of ten songs, three each for each of the members, Michael Formanek, Tomas Fujiwara, and Mary Halvorson, in addition to an excellent celebratory cover, confirms the trio as one of the most original and creative groups on the contemporary jazz scene, strong in a peculiar understanding that runs through the entire process of musical creation, from the “organizational setting” phase to the final product in which the articulated chains of notes and the phase shifts of the guitar, the imperious pace of the bass and the free rhythm of the drums and vibraphone find a natural composition that becomes the language of the trio.

If the working method is now tested, the results remain unpredictable every time, which we now find fixed on disk, with the burden and pleasure of telling. And so a possible method is to put ourselves in Alice’s shoes and observe these strange and fascinating creatures up close.

Wandering among the ten examples we find, therefore, abstract rhythms and guitars engaged in drawing a path towards the melody, (“Wingbeats“), a vibraphone that plays at confusing itself with the guitar strings (“Greenish Tents”), double basses that rush to chase crooked phrases set up in unison by guitar and vibraphone, until the first is freed in a liberating solo flight (“Irriverent Grace”), a drum that elbows to emerge between bass and guitar, (“How may i inconvenience you?”) a fight between an elliptical guitar and a cumbersome bass (“Pyrric”), scraps of Monk that punctuate a bouncing foray into free-leaning funk, (“Knots“), a two-man race of guitar and vibraphone with sudden stops and reverses (“Somewhat agree“).

“This is the second album where we’ve written pieces for the vibraphone,” says Formanek. “Even though it’s a somewhat anomalous formation, it’s still a guitar trio. With the vibraphone it reminds me of Red Norvo with Tad Farlow and Mingus. It’s a totally different music, but we’re still working with those colors.”

And Charles Mingus himself, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, is the recipient of the album’s final homage, a rhythmically shifting and bluesy-flavored version of the famous “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” a sort of battle between structure and freedom that bears the unmistakable signature of the “turn of the screw.”