Jeremy Pelt's 12th studio album, 2015's
Tales, Musings and Other Reveries, finds the trumpeter continuing on his trajectory of making swaggering yet artful and introspective post-bop. The album follows up his equally compelling releases, 2013's
Water and Earth and 2014's
Face Forward, Jeremy. As with those albums,
Pelt succeeds here in combining all of his disparate stylistic inspirations -- from swinging, straight-ahead jazz to expansive modalism to soulful fusion -- into one cohesive sound that is never anything but organic. Even his bold choice of using two drummers here,
Billy Drummond (heard in the right channel) and
Victor Lewis (heard in the left), never gets in the way of creating utterly lithe, buoyant, and often gorgeous music. Also joining
Pelt here are pianist
Simona Premazzi and maverick, genre-defying bassist
Ben Allison, who add their own forward-thinking touches to
Pelt's sophisticated compositions. ~ Matt Collar