Josh Berman couldn't have picked a more appropriate label for
Old Idea, his first album as a leader. Sure,
Old Idea probably would have worked for some indie labels other than Delmark, including ESP-Disk in New York City and hatHUT in Switzerland. But
Berman isn't based in the Big Apple or Switzerland; he's based in Chicago, where Delmark has been documenting the local avant-garde jazz scene religiously since the rise of the AACM in the 1960s.
Berman's strong ties to Chicago's avant-garde jazz scene and Delmark's strong ties to that scene make them a perfect match, and Delmark founder/president Bob Koester (who produced this album in 2007) clearly does right by the cornetist on
Old Idea. This 50-minute CD is quite faithful to the history of avant-garde jazz in Chicago, where a long list of improvisers have been known for outside playing that is reflective and pensive rather than violent, harsh, dense, or confrontational.
Old Idea isn't abstract and cerebral in an angry way; it is abstract and cerebral in a reflective way. Also,
Berman and his colleagues (tenor saxman
Keefe Jackson, vibist
Jason Adasiewicz, acoustic bassist Anton Hatwich, and drummer Nori Tanaka) take an inside/outside approach, and a few of
Berman's pieces could be described as advanced post-bop.
Old Idea, for all its abstraction, is not an exercise in atonal chaos. But the disc clearly has an avant-garde orientation, and it is safe to say that Delmark, Koester, and the AACM all did their part to shape the sort of nuanced abstraction that
Berman favors on
Old Idea -- which, as its title indicates, isn't groundbreaking by 2007 standards but is a solid, worthy outing from the probing cornetist. ~ Alex Henderson