Recorded at the same time and influenced by the recording of their 2020 album The Anthony Braxton Project, the NY Thumbscrew trio of Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar, and Michael Formanek on double bass & electric bass present 9 original compositions, three pieces from each of the musicians, of melodically inclined forward thinking, creative jazz.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: USA Packaging: Digipack Recorded at Mr. Smalls Studio, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th, 2019, by Nate Campisi.
"Currently one of the most exciting and active groups in boundary-pushing jazz, is the collective trio Thumbscrew, who release their sixth album in seven years with Never Is Enough. Constantly taking the simple, 'guitar trio' line-up into new territories, their music is a masterclass of musical interplay and focused forward momentum.
Late in the summer of 2019 Thumbscrew hunkered down at City of Asylum, the Pittsburgh arts organization that has served as a creative hotbed for the trio via a series of residencies. The immediate plan was for them to rehearse and record a disparate program of Anthony Braxton compositions they'd gleaned from his Tri-Centric Foundation archives, pieces released last year on The Anthony Braxton Project, an album celebrating his 75th birthday.
At the same time, the triumvirate brought in a batch of original compositions that they also spent time refining and recording, resulting in Never Is Enough. While not intentional, The Anthony Braxton Project and Never Is Enough do seem to speak eloquently (if cryptically) to each other.
"Braxton's presence was very strong in this period, spending time with his music, reading some of the composition notes" Formanek says. "I think and hope the influence was there. It was definitely in our minds. I don't know if there's a direct influence, but definitely inspiration."
Each member contributed three pieces to the project, and the album opens with Fujiwara's amiable "Camp Easy," a gently loping piece that starts with a pastoral improvised passage that anticipates the spacious counterpoint between Formanek's thoughtfully surefooted bass and Halvorson's slippery lines. Fujiwara's "Through an Open Window" features a very different kind of movement, with episodic motifs that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Inspired by a hotel view in Sarajevo, the piece suggests a layered panorama, "a cityscape skyline, rain falling, mountains, a lot of visual inspiration with people, clouds, and cars subtly moving and shifting," Fujiwara says.
With a rock 'n' roll edge, Halvorson's "Sequel to Sadness" maintains the coiled energy of a panther stalking prey, with strategic pauses and a centerpiece drum solo that builds delicious tension. She also contributes the album's most unabashed ballad, a supplely lyrical tune inspired by standards she's been working on. And Fractured Sanity expands from a telegraphic guitar riff into quicksilver conversation with all three players offering agitated commentary.
Formanek's title track introduces a whole new array of shades to Thumbscrew's already brimming palette. After decades of almost entirely avoiding the instrument on recordings, he created a squally, atmospheric piece that gives him plenty of space for his non-idiomatic electric bass work. "I conceived 'Never Is Enough' as a piece I was going to record on the electric bass, but could play on either one," he says. The ambiguous title riffs on a classic New Yorker cartoon ("How about never - is never good for you?") but speaks more to "the ever present feeling of being held captive by the insanity of the last four years of...whatever this has been."
Opening with a brief lockstep theme, Formanek's "Emojis Have Consequences" gives each player a distinct part, with their evolving two-against-one interactions weaving a quietly volatile matrix. The album's closer, "Scam Likely," is another palette- expanding by Formanek, with a long abstract duo passage featuring his ambient, electronically altered and synthesized electric bass calls set against Fujiwara's beautifully textured trap work. Halvorson's arrival adds pulsars and star-bursts to the celestial soundscape, which coalesces like a galaxy being born. Which makes sense considering the music took shape in the midst of Thumbscrew's deep dive into Braxton's vast and varied oeuvre.
"We weren't separating them out when we were rehearsing and recording," Halvorson says. "It was just going through this music, and one tune might be Braxton, and one might be an original. The thing I get from both is an intense sense of focus."
The focus each player brings to Thumbscrew and the dense web of experience they share is part of what makes the ensemble so extraordinary."-Cuneiform Records