In the Lower Register with Josh Sinton

courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications

This past November Australia-based Iluso Records released the latest album of new jazz by Josh Sinton, who alternates between baritone saxophone and bass clarinet. The title of the album is one of those exercises in prankish long-windedness: making bones, taking draughts, bearing unstable millstones pridefully, idiotically, prosaically. Sinton leads a newly-formed group called the Predicate Trio. He is joined in his adventures in the lower register by cellist Christopher Hoffman, and the two of them are joined by Tom Rainey on drums. This is yet another album that Amazon.com has yet to discover, but bandcamp has created a Web page for purchasing both physical and digital versions of the album.

Regular readers probably know that I am a sucker for low-register sonorities, having written a piece about the saxophone-bassoon Post-Haste Reed Duo about a week ago. However, the Bay Area has been somewhat of a hotbed for groups that prefer such sonorities. Back in 1996 Cornelius Boots began building up repertoire for a quartet of bass clarinets called Edmund Wells; and two members of that quartet, Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, went on to form a bass clarinet duo onomatopoeically-named Sqwonk. (Anderle also plays bass clarinet in a quintet called Splinter Reeds.) In addition Beth Custer leads a quartet of clarinets of all imaginable sizes called Clarinet Thing; and, of course, when we depart from the recent past in the Bay Area, it is hard to overlook the breadth of clarinet sizes that were mastered by Anthony Braxton.

This is not to diminish the significance of Sinton’s recent work; but it would be unfair for me to avoid “coming clean” with the disclaimer that I have made many of my own bones, so to speak, as a writer through listening to low-register instruments, particularly those in the reed family. As a result, most of the idioms and gestures that the Predicate Trio brings to Sinton’s pieces are more familiar to me than they probably will be to many other listeners. Beyond invention itself, however, I have to say that I am more than satisfied with the technique that all three players bring to this recording. Most important is how Rainey comes up with just the right eccentric rhythms to keep up with the irregular melismata that emerge from both of Sinton’s instruments. If I have any regret, it is that Hoffman’s cello work did not spend more time in the foreground, rather than providing rhythm in the background.