Head Out

Simon Nabatov has a special relationship with New York City, migrating there from Russia with his parents as a young man and studying at Juilliard for four years. It’s where his ultimate musical direction was shaped by jazz as much as his classical background and the evidence is apparent throughout this recording session, from its warmth to its playfulness, from its complexity to its special collective fluency, a virtuosity compounded of technique and attentiveness that includes every member of the group, each invested with a distinctive lyricism that can imbue every note in a phrase with its own subtle personality, an art marked by subtle inflections of pitch and rhythm that will connect John Hébert’s bass, Ches Smith’s drums and vibraphone, Ralph Alessi’ s trumpet and Tony Malaby’s saxophones with Nabatov’s own attention to detail and the potential richness of the musical instant.

The music’s distinctive identity begins in the puckish wit of Nabatov’s compositions, works that will merge brief repeated motifs, whether brightly tuneful or pointedly dissonant; these patterns supplying fresh ground to a group of highly inventive improvisers, clearly selected by a subtle ear for both strong personalities and a complementary empathy.

The resultant music is both highly organized and unpredictable, a quality that shines through whether the group is a quartet or quintet. It will come to the fore on a relatively brief piece like “Delicate Decline”, in which a simultaneity of standard and microtonal pitches comes to suggest an ultimate accord. That exploration of timbre and tonality extends to “Ominous”, with Nabatov’s use of an iPad for the initial church bell invocation and the exotic unison of arco bass, piano and trumpet. A work like “Trumped-up Story” manages to combine extended compositional detail, shifting form and collective interaction, moving from music-box lyricism to a joyously harmonious welter of colliding events.

Head Out celebrates and extends a longstanding relationship between a singular musician and a city that has long served as both melting pot and incubator for sonic visions.

Stuart Broomer