If the ee cummings fan club held a contest to find a jazz equivalent to the famed poet’s quirky, no caps style, they would have an incredible finalist in multi-instrumentalist and playwright l.d. levy, whose way of presenting his name (initials and lower case) and album title (dnand) bring the poet immediately to mind.
Levy (levy) extends this style to his sparse, to the point bio on the bandcamp site, where we learn (again, all in lower case) that, as far as jazz background, he’s played with Richard Davis, Beaver Harris, Don Pullen, Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, and played throughout Europe as an improvising soloist (though he doesn’t specify which instruments for each).
As idiosyncratic as cummings was with words, levy is with the ten offbeat, sparse, avant-gardish pieces of dnand, performed – sometimes solo, sometimes together – on his cool array of woodwinds (bass clarinet, alto flute, alto sax) as well as piano and bass, backed at times with Paul Westfahl’s fascinating drum patterns.
From the dark haunting opening piano chords, fast paced high hat and clarinet cacophony of “Map” through the offbeat five-minute sax only closing suite (“Impression” and “Joy,’ which borrows from Beethoven), it’s a weird but somehow fascinating journey, pure spirited whimsy with unexpected twists and turns. Though because they are all free-wheeling and trippy, truly any track would serve as an entry point to this unusual (by design) aural experience, perhaps the most interesting is the mesmerizing, hypnotic “Eros and Distance,” which features a haunting piano motif, dark bassline and moody clarinet, all played by levy at the same time.
So he’s his own ensemble, and one can imagine how challenging that was to put together. As you listen to oddities like the three-part all-clarinet Suite Seule and wonder just who levy’s intended audience is, keep in mind that various tracks totaled 80 spins on a handful of stations reporting to JazzWeek. Kudos to those programmers for playing something this non-mainstream and bold and for the listeners who, if they opened their mind, just might find themselves charmed by the uniqueness levy offers.
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