Label: Whirlwind Recordings, 2022
Personnel - Morgan Guerin: tenor saxophone, EWI, bass clarinet; Joel Ross: vibraphone, marimba; Charles Altura: guitar; Harish Raghavan: acoustic bass; Eric Harland: drums.
The sophomore album from the New York-based bassist and composer Harish Raghavan, In Tense, consists of six originals written with a specific quintet in mind - multi-woodwind player Morgan Guerin, guitarist Charles Altura, vibraphonist Joel Ross and drummer Eric Harland. The musical setting, defined with more composure than heat, manifests a new trajectory in his discography, and we find each musician navigating hills and valleys as if tracking a well-charted course. Here, the contemporary vision remains intact and the musical skills efficient, as demonstrated in his debut, Call for Action, and in sideman appearances with the likes of Ambrose Akinmusire, Walter Smith III and Marquis Hill.
“AMA”, which opens with big bass notes and subtle electronics, feels like an emotionally charged pop/rock song with enough air to breathe, proffering crisp harmonic progressions, fresh melodicism, and a spastic solo by Raghavan. The piece shares some similarities in posture and texture with the title track, which, colored by vibes, features a charismatic guitar solo while diluting most of its tension in subtleness.
The wryly post-bop elegance of “Circus Music”, a tune written in response to our troubled times, unwraps a well-outlined theme with rhythmic accentuation and a slight angular bend. Guerin and Altura, who often work cheek by jolt throughout the record, alternate bars here, applying their clear speeches after a patiently evolving solo by Ross. They reel off again on both “S2020” and the closing “Prayer”. The former invokes the future with a complex theme, carrying a folk innuendo in the melodic proceedings and a straight-eight bass groove that steams things up; the latter, more glamorous than fervent, accelerates in tempo, going funky-ish in the interest of the improvisations before reviving the shininess of the main melody.
“Eight-Thirteen” got its name from the time a minute before Raghavan’s son was born. It’s structured and restructured with changeable passages that don’t require to be strengthened in the flow since the bassist keeps the groove solid and going, always backed by Harland’s conversational drums.
Not all tracks hit us hard or with the same intensity, but with the assistance of musicians with a penchant for exploring sonic terrain, Raghavan builds his own sonic architecture, partly meditative and partly propulsive.
Favorite Tracks:
01 - AMA ► 02 - Circus Music ► 06 - Prayer