" Twenty-five years later and still Denver’s best jazz band."–Jazz @ Altitude review of Dazzle reunion concert
More than 30 years after the release of their acclaimed debut album, Denver-based quintet the Jazz WORMS make their belated return with Squirmin’, due out March 19, 2021 via Capri Records. Well worth waiting for, the thrilling new session reconvenes all five original WORMS – pianist Andy Weyl, saxophonist Keith Oxman, drummer Paul Romaine, cornetist Ron Miles and bassist Mark Simon – on an invigorating set of all-new material that picks up where the band left off three decades earlier.
More than 30 years after the release of their acclaimed debut album, Denver-based quintet the Jazz WORMS make their belated return with Squirmin’, due out March 19, 2021 via Capri Records. Well worth waiting for, the thrilling new session reconvenes all five original WORMS – pianist Andy Weyl, saxophonist Keith Oxman, drummer Paul Romaine, cornetist Ron Miles and bassist Mark Simon – on an invigorating set of all-new material that picks up where the band left off three decades earlier.
Just as their 1987 debut, Crawling Out, made species-appropriate reference to the emergence of five new voices on the jazz scene, so Squirmin’ captures the sense of eager anticipation and urgency that marks this long-overdue sophomore effort. Both the continuity and the passage of time are reflected by the album cover, which replicates its predecessor with a bit more gray hair and an updated fashion sense.
“I think Crawling Out made a mark of some sort,” says Oxman with a fair degree of understatement. “I run into people all the time who say, ‘I still have that original vinyl,’ or ‘I used to love hearing you guys play.’ So it feels marvelous to be together again.”
The long hiatus can be chalked up to the fact that each of the WORMS has enjoyed a busy and fruitful career in his own right. Oxman is a mainstay of the Denver scene who has recorded albums with such legends as Charles McPherson, Dave Liebman and Houston Person in addition to being a highly influential educator at the city’s East High School. Miles has become one of the most acclaimed artists on the current jazz scene, recording his own albums for Blue Note while forging meaningful collaborations with greats like Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Brian Blade and Joshua Redman. Weyl has toured the world with the vocal group Rare Silk and crossed paths with such artists of note as James Moody, Tom Harrell, Benny Golson and Eddie Harris. Romaine and Simon co-founded the Colorado supergroup Convergence.
But when they first joined forces in the early 1980s, the WORMS (the name is an acronym for their respective last names) were simply five rising stars on the Denver jazz scene eager to find opportunities to craft an original sound. “We all grew up together,” reflects Oxman. “We were all young guys coming up at the same time who had similar ideas about music and just enjoyed playing together.” After a few years, however, each found himself on a separate path until a 2014 reunion concert at the revered Denver jazz club Dazzle revealed that the old chemistry was intact.
Squirmin’ not only fulfills the band members’ long-held desire to recapture the magic, it also marks the realization of a dream for Capri Records founder Thomas Burns, who was himself in the early stages of a remarkable career as a label owner, promoter, photographer, writer and entrepreneur. “I really wanted to record their first album, but [vocalist and label owner] James Van Buren beat me to it,” Burns recalls. “The Jazz WORMS had such a different sound for that period of time, when most jazz musicians in Denver were still looking back at the classic jazz of Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. To hear a group of young guys at the time just blowin' their asses off was really exciting.”
That sound still feels vital and current today, realized through eight captivating new compositions. The album kicks off, appropriately enough, with Simon’s sizzling “Launching Pad,” on which he and Romaine lay down a muscular groove punctuated by knife-edged horn lines. Simon also contributed the jaunty “What If All?” which spurs graceful melodic flights from Weyl and Miles. Romaine’s two pieces were inspired by his pet birds – and, in the case of “Wheaty Bowl,” one iconic Bird: Charlie Parker, who Wheaty can apparently chirp along to and whose memorable compositions are quoted throughout the piece. “Bu’s Box,” meanwhile, reference Bu’s cardboard home, which supplements Romaine’s percussive arsenal on the tune itself.
Oxman’s new compositions are both dedications. “Joaquin” is something of a companion piece to an earlier tune, “Elena,” recorded with Charles McPherson. That piece was written for a close friend’s granddaughter; “Joaquin” is for the same friend’s grandson, and captures the sense of wonder and tenderness evoked by a newborn. “The Chimento Files,” which closes the album, is a simmering blues dedicated to one of Oxman’s East High colleagues, Alan Chimento. Weyl’s pair of offerings range from the blistering “Lickity-Split” to the wistful, self-explanatory “Balladesque.”
The results of this welcome rebirth exceeded expectations. “It was magical,” Burns says. “I love the way these guys interact. They seem symbiotic: they speak as one, they listen to one another, all the stuff that they teach about jazz musicians – they have it. They always shine as a group.”
“I'm thrilled about this album,” Oxman says. “I think it’s even better than the first one. I think that’s mostly due to the fact that we all truly love each other and love playing together, even though it's sometimes been difficult to get us all in one room.”
Cornetist and trumpeter Ron Miles connects African American blues and gospel roots to the tangled branches of contemporary genre-bending jazz with rare perceptiveness. On this set of originals, named after a civil rights-era proclamation, Miles draws regular collaborator Bill Frisell, pianist Jason Moran, bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Brian Blade into seven cool thematic and improv conversations. Enhanced by Miles giving his partners the whole score, not just their own parts, these are breezy early-swing figures mixed with modern time-stretches, and graceful sways like 60s Miles Davis, tugged at by free jazz, deep-toned dirges. The brittle and then soaring title track establishes the group’s collective alertness, while Darken My Door segues between quiet piano lyricism, romantic turbulence and country grooves. Revolutionary Congregation mixes tenderness and raw multiphonic brass effects. Mother Juggler is a beautiful lament, and Is There Room in Your Heart for a Man Like Me is a rolling ensemble feature that keeps its narrative shape. It is often an understated session, but it exerts a powerful grip.
Orphic Machine is an ambitious project from clarinetist/composer/bandleader Ben Goldberg, which is arguably a way you could describe any Goldberg project, but he reaches both further out and further back to find his chief motivation this time. Instead of taking his primary cues from a music beacon like Steve Lacy, Thelonious Monk, or even Bob Dylan and Sebastian Bach, Goldberg found inspiration from an old college professor back at Brandeis University in the late ’70’s.
Back then, poet Allen Grossman taught a course on “The Representation of Experience” which introduced Goldberg to the idea of thinking about things unconventionally. Those ideas planted seeds in the young Goldberg that never left him, but also became more poignant during a recent period of deeper reflection. That’s when he decided to revisit Grossman from both his personal recollections and Grossman’s book of maxims The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers — a sort of poetry about the role of poetry in mankind — to craft a set of music around these powerful precepts.
Since this is an album built around philosophical poetry and Goldberg is an instrumentalist, it presented a special challenge to Grossman’s former student; though one he’s not unaccustomed to facing. It’s the way he met the challenge that makes Orphic Machine (on sale from BAG Production Records/Royal Potato Family) succeed as a musical tribute to the ideas he encountered over thirty-five years ago. First, he needed Grossman’s verses to be recited in such a way that the words and the melodies blend into a seamless single being. Enter violinist Carla Kihlstedt, whose breathy, lithe delivery brings to life the words, singing them as if it were another instrument.
For this endeavor, in fact, there are an assemblage of exceptional musicians but knowing Goldberg’s career, he clearly picked them because his deep familiarity with them and trust in them, another key ingredient that makes this abstract idea convert into concrete results. Joining Goldberg’s clarinet and Kihlstedt’s violin and vocals are Ron Miles (trumpet), Rob Sudduth (tenor sax), Myra Melford (piano), Nels Cline (electric guitars), Kenny Wollesen (vibes), Greg Cohen (bass) and Ches Smith (drums). Goldberg knows exactly how to deploy all this talent at his disposal, where everyone gets solos but it never feels like they are the variety; it’s all part of the overall fabric of the music. Often more prominent is how, in using jazz and classical music arrangement techniques, they work together to form the complex character of each of Goldberg’s compositions, each of which slices across musical boundaries in forming mini-suites on every track.
Take, for instance, “Immortality,” beginning with Cohen’s ruminative bass figures, segueing into a soft march to match Kihlstedt’s floating recitals, and a chamber sequence sandwiched a rock shuffle that thanks to Cline’s rhythm guitar sounds not too unlike the Rolling Stone’s “Beast of Burden.” Gradually, a dominant note emerges, seemingly from Wollesen’s vibes and gets increasingly insistent as one by one everybody joins in playing it to bring the song to a rousing conclusion.
For most albums, that would be the apogee, but several other tracks are just as aspiring. “Reading” is launched by just a handful of sung poetry, followed by Cohen’s own interpretation of the phrases on bass, and some crafty layering of clarinet, sax, trumpet and violin and vibraphone followed by a swinging solo turn by Melford. The other players return with the meticulously weaved score, a perfect balance of jazz and avant chamber music. Cline’s menacing guitar lurks just behind the front line, embedding yet another element into an eclectic mixture. “Care,” at least as it begins, is a pretty folk strain which suits Kihlstedt’s voice rather well. A syncopated motif led by Smith’s pliant rhythms makes up a key part of an arrangement perfectly fit the elegant, sophisticated melody that unfolds. That would be plenty good enough for this performance but Cline breaks out with some stinging blues phraseology just as Kihlstedt completes her final stanza.
The whole package of these ten tunes culminates into the title song. After a delicate piano intro by Melford, Kihlstedt’s airy voice suddenly appears out of nowhere, repeating the line “The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings,” which may appear weird in print but the ingenuity lies in Goldberg fashioning music around these and other Grossman aphorisms in such a way that they don’t sound weird at all…and even makes perfect sense sometimes put in this context. The song proceeds in a quiet, almost chamber music manner until Cline’s signature Nordic rage takes over more than nine minutes in, leading a circular figure that recalls (but does not mimic) the extended coda of the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” It puts a raucous exclamation point on the album, a release that seemed to be building up and lurking for the entire project. And yet, totally unexpected.
Allen Grossman, by the way, passed away just last year. Orphic Machine is a testament to the immortality of forward-thinking ideas that keep the soul of its originator alive after the body has passed. It’s also testament that a part of Grossman remains alive in Goldberg, who has sublimely assimilated so many disparate influences, and is able to distill them into a product he projects through his own, kaleidoscopic lens.
