Dikeman, Hong, Lumley, Warelis - Old Adam on Turtle Island (Relative Pitch Records, 2025)

By Don Phipps

The music created on Old Adam on Turtle Island by four skillful musicians – John Dikeman on tenor sax, Marta Warelis on piano, Aaron Lumley on bass, and Sun-Mi Hong on drums – offers plenty of heat interspersed with abstractions and quiet solemn passages. According to Dikeman, the music is, at its heart, a reflection of the horrible legacy of colonization, and how religion can lead to transcendence or tyranny (or perhaps both at the same time?).

Recorded in November 2022 at Amsterdam’s Splendor (an art space which hosts meetings, musical events, and offers artists a workspace and musical laboratory - it recently announced a “Jazzclub” as part of its offerings), Old Adam on Turtle Island covers seven Dikeman compositions over two tracks – four in the first set (“The Rev - Descent - Choral - Let's Try”) and three in the second (“Groove - Choral – Manifest”). Each track is a medley of free form development across a loose architecture, and in these compositions, the musicians generate their own intense and technically demanding variations and embellishments, creating swirling atmospheric whirlwinds and tunnels of sound.

While the two cuts cover a range of human feeling and thought processes, the second has slightly more dramatic and emotional heft, with its “camel crossing desert” opening and its spiritual and sorrowful winddown. However, each track features incredible passages that allow the musicians to create meaningful contributions. Dikeman’s sax voicings burn upward and outward – his wails, legato notes, and slurry runs generate intense arcs and dark moods. At the end of track 2, listen to how he responds to Lumley’s lines, like a kite tethered yet free to whip about in the high wind and rain, loose and unconstrained. Warelis provides pronounced Cecil Taylor-like rambles and clusters of dissonance - at times she even whisks her fingers up and down the inside of the piano. Lumley supplies a precise combination of plucking and bowing; his motifs vacillate between scratchy effects and notes that traverse odd yet fascinating intervals. Hong adds full trap set sonic riptides as well as timely colorful cymbal splashes.

When listening to the dense sonorities and cerebral soundscapes of Old Adam on Turtle Island, it may be helpful to remember that murky and somber anguish will always be a part of reconciling sinister human nature (Old Adam) and its effect on “Turtle Island,” the indigenous expression for the Earth.