Another Morning CD Review
by Andrew Freund

As a jazz lover, are you ready for a vibrant new recording that takes the music in a wonderfully fresh direction? To those answering yes, it is difficult to over-recommend the joyous new CD, Another Morning, from the drummer Matt Jorgensen, and his band, 451.

Here is music that carries us forward, by simultaneously honoring both the great jazz tradition and the popular music of the airwaves, the inevitable soundtrack of our lives. Here is highly propulsive music, overflowing with the undisguised high spirits of certain classic rock, yet very specific unto itself and an unusually coherent piece of work. After the band’s previous recording, the hypnotically secretive Hope, one recognizes that this extroverted recording is the culmination of exceptional woodshedding and design, presenting one group’s cri de coeur, its latest answer to the artistic conundrums and opportunities of the current day.

Another Morning opens with a bit of stately, churchy organ (from Ryan Burns, later featured on other electric and electronic keyboards). A moment of silence, and the entire group -- also sax, trumpet (Thomas Marriott, guesting) and bass, all propelled by Matt’s impassioned, everywhere-at-once drumming – repeats the melody, the energy off the charts. Balance and abandon – and the stage is set. The song is New Beginnings, an original by Jorgensen (and the trumpeter Jeff McSpadden). A graciously relaxed solo from altoist Mark Taylor ensues, and the tune is memorably pretty, to the point that on first hearing I was wondering whether this wasn’t a standard whose title I couldn’t quite place. A standard, no – but a standard is established, of tuneful passion, with space for jazz solos.

What follows is confidence itself, music comfortable within its own imperatives. A synthesis of jazz and rock has long made sense, but for some of us its most famous exemplification, the “fusion” of the seventies, was too cheesy and gimmicky for its own good (despite its legendary proponents: Davis, Hancock, Corea, Shorter, Zawinul, etc.). To my ears, this is better. What makes Jorgensen’s music jazz/rock -- and not rock/jazz -- is that every instrumental line is crystal clear and can be followed throughout, with a respect for individual musicianship that is often lost in the thrash and fuzz of rock. To employ a current cliché, 451 remains jazz in large measure because it is invariably “artisanal.”

So – jazz/rock that is both outgoing and reflective? A fine example is Burns’s Birds, which opens with an extensive dialogue between his classic fender rhodes and the bowed bass of the great Phil Sparks. The tune is a band original that reflects its title in searching, soaring development, while instantly imbedding in the mind. A second Jorgensen/McSpadden tune, Sweetpea, is almost cruel in its relentless exoticism (Paul Simon, without the neurotic impulse – or the gnomic words). Even the two covers of high-era rock, of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter, that inspiration to the Manson clan, and Neil Young’s Ohio, picturing the Kent State massacre – tunes, therefore, with a potential of implicit tragedy -- essay the dynamic engagement of rock rather than its dark precincts.

Many jazz purists feel that the music of such albums as Kind of Blue, or A Love Supreme, was essentially perfect and that any modernization or modification from that high water mark diminishes the special magnificence of jazz. (There’s this guy named Wynton, you know. . . .) Folk like that might find Another Morning disappointing, slight, aggravating. Other people could find these songs insufficiently varied, so much of a piece, too consistently uptempo and upbeat. But that would be to underrate the achievement of this CD, of four (sometimes five) musicians who simultaneously give us the interweaving individualism and fine detailing of jazz plus the direct, loving, spirited amplitude of rock. And by such reckonings, Matt Jorgensen’s latest work is some kind of masterpiece.