(2020) John Jeffrey - Passage


Review:
The painter Takao Tanabe was one of John Jeffrey’s inspirations for these four long improvised tracks. The artist is known for land and seascapes that depict Canada’s northwestern coast in luminous blocks of color. Neither wholly representational or fully abstract, his paintings convey a sort of idealized, distilled vision of natural beauty, and it is easy to make the connection to the surreal, airy clarity of Jeffrey’s music. John Jeffrey is best known as the drummer for Ripley Johnson’s Moon Duo and Rose City Band projects, but here he plays an array of instruments, primarily guitar but also drums, bass, synths and vibraphone. He brings in a few guests, most notably Marc Jenkins who lays some gorgeous pedal steel over the long opener “Lonely Years.” All four cuts were improvised and recorded live — Alice Coltrane was another touchstone — though in a contemplative way which favors tone and atmosphere over feats of virtuoso skill. “Lonely Years” sets the template with a single solid line of guitar melody, constructed out of elongated notes that bend and curve into the distance. For a time, that and a vibrating curtain of ambient synthetic sound are all there is; the music moves slowly but with bright certainty rather like Marc Nelson’s work with Pan•American. Then a shuffling beat kicks it into four-four time, a rhythm that moves noticeably faster than the melody, which stretches bar to bar. The whole track feels like a very lucid dream, brightly colored, imbued with unspoken purpose but hard to verbalize. The second cut, “Leaving Franklin,” is a good deal more mobile, following a twitching, glitching conveyer belt of a beat across acres of glowing sustained tones. It moves lightly but with intent and taps into an array of synthesized sounds. Of all four tracks, this one sounds the most like Moon Duo, particularly on the last electronic-heavy album Stars are the Light. The other two tracks, “Play It As it Lays” and “Pacific Calm” are like the opener, full of luminous shimmers of tone and silvery electronic accents, edgeless and serene and still. There is some fusion-y synth work in “Play It As It Lays” that calls to mind certain Tangerine Dream tracks, and a spatter of vibraphone tones in “Pacific Rim” that lends a bucolic tranquility. I’m not saying the tracks are the same, just that they leave the same sort of wake behind them. You rouse yourself feeling that you’ve just meditated on something beautiful and natural, and perhaps gotten behind the natural façade of it into the deep calm of the cosmos.





Tracklist:
01 - Lonely Years
02 - Leaving Franklin
03 - Play It As It Lays
04 - Pacific Calm


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, jazz
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits