Since debuting with their 2015
Wayne Shorter
tribute album
Sound Prints: Live at Monterey Jazz Festival
,
Joe Lovano
and
Dave Douglas
'
Sound Prints
quintet has thrived. While continuing to draw inspiration from
Shorter
's boundary-pushing work, they've expanded their approach, playing ever more original compositions that build upon their roots in the creative downtown New York scene of the '80s and '90s, and as members of
John Zorn
's
Masada
. It was a sound they explored on 2018's
Scandal
, and one which they bring to full fruition on 2021's expansive
Other Worlds
. Split evenly between compositions by
Douglas
Lovano
finds the trumpeter and saxophonist once again joined by their bandmates pianist
Lawrence Fields
, bassist
Linda May Han Oh
, and drummer
Joey Baron
. Together, they play a broad-minded style of jazz that straddles hard-swinging post-bop and avant-garde free improvisation. It's a sound that evokes the classic
Booker Little
/
Eric Dolphy
group of the '60s that recorded at The 5 Spot. Some of the songs have more conventional chordal centers, as with the languid, far-eyed ballad "The Transcendentalists." Primarily, these are adventurous, harmonically open-ended songs that often feel as if they were improvised in the moment out of a single thematic concept. Cuts like "Shooting Stars" and "Antiquity to Outer Space" have a probing, investigative quality marked by bug-like,
Thelonious Monk
-sounding group interplay. Others, like the propulsive "Sky Miles" bring to mind the harmolodic free bop of
Ornette Coleman
, as
chase each other with bluesy intensity through their group's rich harmonic and rhythmic nebulas. In the best way on
, it's easy to lose yourself and get pulled into
' interstellar sparring. ~ Matt Collar