To better understand the fascinating swirl of instruments, offbeat rhythms, wild mood swings, blend of melodic graces with avant-garde cleverness and haunting ambiences that the Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet brings to their fascinating third album Situation, a little history lesson is necessary.
Flute and sax master Coke and guitarist Michel were founding members and onetime co-leaders of the Creative Opportunity Orchestra (CO2), a pioneering Austin-based jazz collective led by late Texas Hall of Fame vocalist Tina Marsh. Innovative compositions, laced with free-form inventions and Marsh’s unique vocalizations CO2 developed an avant-garde jazz sound mixed with a world music sensibility – and over its several decade run involved over 200 musicians.
Coke and Michel carry those expansive, freewheeling sonic sensibilities into their sextet, breaking genre barriers by hypnotically and almost mystically fusing the fascinating individual sounds of jazz veterans Elaine Barber (concert harp), Bob Hoffmar (pedal steel guitar), James Suter (acoustic bass) and Carolyn Trowbridge (vibraphone). Say you randomly start the adventure of listening to Situation with Coke’s composition “Sea and Sky.” You might feel like you’ve stumbled onto an ambient film score rich with atmosphere, dissonant intricacies and oddities, with Barber’s heavenly harp the only truly melodic element to hold on to. But then you can hop up to the opening track, an exploratory re-imagining of Carla Bley’s “440” whose soothing blend of harp, vibes, flute and guitar are both lovely, sweetly melodic and soulful/soul-transporting.
That’s pretty much the aesthetic the whole way through, as the sextet invites us to the party with the whimsical, easy to embrace charms of the harp, flute and guitar driven Coke gem “Sketchy” or the funky-cool sax, vibes and harp showcase “The Seeker,” only to throw our aesthetic compass astray on the weird (but somehow mesmerizing_ ambient/avant-garde free for all “Suikinkutsu” and its sequel piece which closes the set. The collection is all at once weird and wonderful, strange and engaging, distracting and magnificent – truly capturing the spirit of free jazz for the modern era!
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