Midnight Choir

The debut album from West Coast touring artist Jimmy Bennington. The basic style seems to be hanging around the domain of avant-garde jazz, with some excursions into more rhythmic and melodic pieces as the mood takes the band. Half of the compositions (three-and-half of the seven tracks) are from sax player Seth Paynter, one is from Coltrane, and a few are leftovers from around the jazz scene. Given that the leader of the group is a drummer, there's surprisingly little drumming to be heard in the majority of the works, serving more for effect and accentuation than for rhythm, and holding out of whole sections of songs entirely. That said, there's also precious little melody to be heard from the horn section, often simply letting out a few notes at a time, rarely in any noticeable order. The free jazz movement admittedly has (at least) two aspects: that of the twisted melodies and inventive approaches coming from the Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane camps, and that of the sparse, empty, instrumentalism from the side of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and their followers. Aside from a lone Coltrane number here (and a track or two embracing the same basic concepts), the focus is more on the latter style than the former. The catch is that it's somewhat less exciting with only five or six instruments playing, than it is with the full array of sonic possibilities that's usually used in such a sparse format. The players would appear to be fully worth hearing, capable of a decent array of possibilities, but at the same time, it sounds less like a free jazz jam session than it does a simple, lazy, banging out of piano riffs and horn squawks. The album isn't terrible, but one needs to be sure to hear the original Coleman, Sun Ra, and Art Ensemble records for comparison, so that this isn't the listener's first example of the avant-garde.