Messing With Time #1 (Saxophone edition)

A period of non-Internet last month means the first post was pretty lonely for a while, but hopefully the regularity will pick up now I'm back online! For this post I'm going to give you 3 tracks that mess with your internal metronome... they're not necessarily in crazy time signatures, but they require a new look at where beat 1 is! Coincidentally, the first three tracks I wanted to share of this kind of stuff all featured sax players...

Julian Arguelles - free, rhapsodic, manic
This sax player, now based in Edinburgh, keeps putting out really interesting things, and stretching the jazz genre that little bit further. Escapade is one of the most unique and intense albums I know - as a musician, I can hear that the whole band are connected and in sync, yet so much of what they are playing surely can't be notated, it's all too free! Some players will be clearly flying solo, while others lock together in complex melodic stabs and interjections. I would be fascinated to know all this worked in the studio...
Julian Arguelles - Coffee and Diesel


Joshua Redman - funky, quirky, rocky
Joshua Redman is my favourite sax player on the plant - his pieces are exactly the kind of stuff I strive to write for small bands, his playing is flawless, his solos are inventive and avoid clichés, while each album he comes out with does something a bit different. On his album Momentum he went at funk & rock with a bang of studio gear, and came out with some amazing sounds, all from only a few stupidly talented players. (This track features none other than Flea on bass!) This is a track for saxophonists, bassists, drummers, keyboard players, and maniacs.
Joshua Redman - Sweet Nasty



Haftor Medbøe Group - melodic, sweeping, quirky
Another Edinburgh based band, Haftor Medbøe is a guitarist and composer really doing something different. This album heavily features Susan McKenzie on soprano saxophone, a player with a classical background, but utterly at home with this type of intense jazz. They are joined by Chris Grieve on trombone, Signy Jakobsdottir on percussionist (a one-woman percussion section!) and the Edinburgh Quartet on strings.
Despite the unusual line up, there's a really coherent sound - the sax & trombone trading lines across the disjointed angular guitar/percussion backings in the middle of this track flow as well as if there was a conventional funk groove. Live, this band puts on some of the best gigs I've seen too - highly recommended.
Haftor Medbøe Group - Teetotum