Laura Jurd and Paul Dunmall

By Gary Chapin

Fanfare and freedom makes sense if you imagine it – as the notes suggest – as a jazz quartet paired with a brass band, the two in dialogue. The brass band tradition plays a powerful but strangely retro-subversive role in jazz history, and not just in the early years. For example, many AACM masters honed their skills in military bands. Look at Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy and Butch Morris’s conductors, who clearly show connections.

The titles of the pieces Fanfare and freedompoint out the connections between brass and New Orleans. We have two fanfares, a stomp and a “toodle-oo.” Laura Jurd’s compositions focus on the brass element as a framework. The first track, “Fanfare 1,” opens with a repeating, rolling sequence from which Dunmall’s sopranino emerges like a brilliant spasm and cascades like a flooded pachinko machine. It’s wonderful. The second title begins in a place called March of the Wooden Soldiers, a twisted, humorous, light travelogue. The quartet enters, led by Dunmall’s tenor, taking us from black and white to color. “Choral” begins with beautiful brass chords/melodies, then takes us scattered through the ruins and brings us to a safe place to rest.

So far I have distinguished between the elements, but inevitably they merge and a unified set of compositions and improvisations emerge. Dunmall is something of a monster, playing Paul Gonsalves opposite Jurds Ellington. The brass section sometimes takes on a chamber music vibe, but can (and does) rage. The trombone solos (I can’t tell which of the two trombonists, Alex Paxton or Raphael Clarkson, is playing) are wonderfully slippery – for example in the beginning of the third track, “Onward Stomp”, a 13-minute masterpiece, where the “bones and Pianos commit misdeeds against each other.” Later, all the brass players organize a jump scare

blatty-blat-blat

directly at a Dunmall elevation.

As a listener and writer, I am always interested in the relationship between improvisation and composition. This is one of the few cases in which the composer Jurd is explicitly interested in this tension! However, all of that is secondary to the fact that the record noises
fantastic, funny and intense.