Tarbaby – You Think This America (Giant Step Arts, 2024)

By Nick Ostrum

From the first stilted notes of the first track, 'Dee Dee,' I was hooked. Actually, those notes also had me scratching my head. Somehow, despite the faithful rendition of the melody, it took me a minute to link it to Ornette Coleman, whose version Live at the Gold Circle Volume 1 is a classic. (After all, it is his composition.) This version is a bit slacker, but just as slyly disjointed. Eric Revis lays a nice solo about three minutes in. The oddity, however, is in the instrumentation. Ornette Coleman famously avoided piano in most cases. Here, Orrin Evans takes lead, turning Ornette’s bent phrasings into something more direct, as Nasheet Waits holds steady in the back.

You Think This America is the latest release from Tarbaby, Evans, Revis and Waits’ long-standing trio, captured live for the first time at Hunter College in 2022. The album consists of ten cuts, two ('Dee Dee' and 'Comme Il Faut') Ornette compositions, one (a beautiful and methodical realization of 'Reconciliation') by Andrew Hill, a Stylistics slow-dance groove ('Betcha By Golly Wow'), a hey-day classic ('Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out'), and compositions by free jazz luminaries David Murray ('Mirror of Youth' and Sunny Murray ('Treetops'), as well as a couple from Evans ('Red Door' and 'Blues [When it Comes]') and Waits (Kush) themselves.

Tarbaby has been around for a decade and a half, and it shows. Their single-minded interplay, their responsiveness, the space they leave each other (again, Revis lays a fat, seamless solo about three minutes into Red Door, and Waits peppers the end of it perfectly leading to his own solo that evokes Andrew Cyrille), their tight bass-piano doubling, their controlled but baroque excursions, all speak to that. Tarbaby also occupies an interesting space on the musical spectrum. It is contemporary jazz, with a surfeit of references to the relevant tradition. It also veers toward the free, as the admittedly polished versions of Treetops, Mirror of Youth and the Coleman pieces attest. The balance, however, is convincing. This is neither free jazzers trying to swing nor fresh departures from the stage at Lincoln Center dabbling in more open compositions. Tarbaby has claimed their ground slightly toward the more structured end of this spectrum and duly earned their reputation as real force. (Just listen to the affecting and almost defiantly confident versions of Reconciliation, Betcha By Golly Wow, and Treetops, or Evans’ own Red Door, which is dangerously infectious.) And they continue to straddle these and various other tendrils of the jazz stem with immaculate musicianship and relentless creativity. In You Think This America,that all comes through and makes a convincing argument that the future of the music might not just be in deviant branches of extended techniques, stylistic collisions, and the extremes of noise and quiet. It might also lie closer to the trunk.

You Think This America is available as a download from Bandcamp:

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