Numbers Maker, the third album from Desertion Trio, is actually their first to be recorded as such. 2018's Midtown Tilt was billed to Desertion Trio and Jamie Saft, while 2019's Twilight Time, credited to the trio, included keyboardist Ron Stabinsky and Sun Ra Arkestra vocalist Tara Middleton. Numbers Maker also marks the debut of drummer Jason Nazary after Kevin Shea's departure. It was recorded live in front of a studio audience at New Haven, Connecticut's Firehouse 12 and was released without overdubs or retakes. Desertion Trio revisits two tracks from earlier outings including the title tune and a cover of the 1938 Margarita Lecuona-penned rhumba hit "Taboo," which has been recorded by everyone from Ahmad Jamal and Les Baxter to Billy May and Enoch Light.
Set-opener "Albion" is a guidepost for the rest of the album. It commences with roiling snares and cymbals as Millevoi states a dramatic, surf-inflected theme and bassist Johnny DeBlase rumbles beneath. After a couple of choruses, the jam opens up and the bassist's role is clarified: the instrument is the rhythmic hub this trio turns on. As Millevoi and Nazary begin free interplay, DeBlase circles back through alternating patterns, builds on them, then offers them to each of his bandmates, individually and together. The tune unfurls along a seemingly direct line even as it carves out new harmonic pathways, recombining blues, hard rock, and surf inside free, very electric jazz. On "Buist" the rhythm section is as a coiled beast. Millevoi responds by creating jagged chordal fragments, muted riffs, spiky wah-wah vamps, and percussive strumming before cutting loose with blistering, improvised guitar skronk that intersects the unnerving terrain between Pete Cosey, Eddie Hazel, and Sonny Sharrock. The redone "Taboo" is -- sans the mysterious, sparkling lounge keyboards it offered on Twilight Time -- far more sinister. Its tempo is slower, its central vamp transformed into a creeping processional that could have appeared in a forgotten spaghetti western score. Millevoi works with the slow, tenser vibe, bridging Dick Dale's reverbed whammy bar approach to surf pointillism and nuanced Latin tropes -- it is a rhumba after all -- and the bluesy, exploratory swagger of Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies is wrapped in jagged jazz harmony. The rhythm section underscores his guitar lines with meandering yet forceful accents adding drama. The redone "Numbers Maker" commences with telegraph-key snares and a pulsing, circular bassline offering a seemingly endless rhythmic vamp. Millevoi articulates the melodic theme, eventually reaching across to extend it in each succeeding chorus. At six minutes, he sheds the skin of restraint; his playing gets noisier, edgier, and speedier. It's a blistering, virtuosic guitar attack that is barely containable by his bandmates. Numbers Maker is intense and unrelenting. Its single-minded focus summarizes where the trio has been, albeit with a new vocabulary, and lurches forward to embrace a more direct method of communication that adds a prominent place for surprise to their already prodigious improvisational acumen and visceral power.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo