Label: Pacific Coast Jazz, 2021

Personnel - Matt Panayides: guitar; Rich Perry: tenor saxophone; Matt Vashlishan: wind synth; Robert Sabin: bass; Mark Ferber: drums.

New York-based guitarist and composer Matt Panayides might not be as active as a leader as we would like, but his originals are always consistently contemporary and attractive, attributes that should be enough to keep listeners from both sides of the jazz spectrum engaged.

His third outing, Field Theory, features two musicians he previously recorded with - the notorious tenorist Rich Perry and the drummer Mark Ferber - as well as two recent collaborators - the wind synth player Matt Vashlishan (a member of Dave Liebman’s Expansions Group) and the bassist Robert Sabin. This ensemble has been playing in New York venues since 2018, the year of its formation, and, together, they paint an agreeable picture, often mixing the jazz language and rock-derived elements in an aurally transparent way, regardless how many sound effects they employ. The opener, “Kite Flying”, is a straight-ahead groover that careens with shredding guitar licks and captivating flights from guitar, EWI and saxophone. Its energy is effectively transferred to “Disturbance”, a playful strutter whose vamped melodic idea and rhythm shift in tone and meter, respectively.

Whereas the fluid “Energy Mover” denotes a bop flair and harmonic saturation, “Field Theory” engages in a complex 7/4 meter, stressing some rock glamour and faultless unisons. There’s an improvised passage in which guitar, saxophone and EWI scorch along the edges, but not as much as on “2.27.20”, whose eerie quality comes from sketches of a sine wave randomly chosen and played by the musicians for exactly three minutes.

The sonic linearity of Panayides’ guitar is bent with a pitch-distorter effect in the introduction of “Closer Now”, a tuneful piece carried out at a comfortable waltzing tempo. You’ll easily find moments of pleasure not only here, but also during the unextended suite “Penta Folk”, whose four parts include episodes of dawning tranquility, pop and folk connotations, fusion panache with asymmetric form, and streamlined cinematic feel.

Panayides finds himself in these pretty catchy tunes, each of them skillfully incorporating the past and the future, the familiar and the unexpected.