Label: Sunnyside Records, 2021
Personnel - Abraham Burton: tenor saxophone; Lucian Ban: piano.
American saxophonist Abraham Burton has turned heads in projects of drummer Louis Hayes, pianist Horace Tapscott, and as a member of the Mingus Big Band. Romanian-born pianist Lucian Ban has been building a name for himself through fruitful collaborations with saxophonist Alex Harding, violist Mat Maneri, bassist John Hébert and, recently, the British multi-reedist John Surman. The two musicians are not strangers to each other since Burton is a central constituent in Ban’s Elevation quartet. Yet, they team up for the first time as a duo on Blacksalt, a seven-track set recorded live at the Baroque Hall in Timisoara, Romania, in 2018.
The album’s first two tracks, “Opening / Freeflow” and “Belize” are representative of the personal and musical kinship shared by these two sonic builders. Dedicated to Pharoah Sanders, the former has the saxophonist blowing with prayerful utterance while the pianist - ushering into percussive muted notes, lush chords and flexible textural coils - finds efficient ways to better serve his associate's spiritual fire, expressed with range and tonal coloring. The latter tune, on the other hand, charts a dramatic Afro-Caribbean flux that comes peppered with blues movements and a faithful Coltrane terminology.
Like the two aforementioned numbers, the title cut was penned by the twosome, who gets cracking in a burnished post-bop dialogue that progressively leans toward a tempestuous avant-garde before bending into a Latin dance.
Burton’s “Dad” is a 4/4 ballad previously included in the 1999 quartet album Cause and Effect (co-authored with the drummer Eric McPherson). The session closes with two Ban compositions - the crepuscular, rubato tone poem “Untold”; and “Not That Kind of Blues”, the opening piece of Ban/Maneri’s 2013 ECM album Transylvanian Concert, here inflated through a jamming rock 'n roll-ish behavior and nice call-and-response.
With the duo’s sonic worlds closely attuned, this disc is worth searching for.
Grade A-
Favorite Tracks:
01 - Opening/Freeflow ► 02 - Belize ► 06 - Untold