I was going to say that this album shows us another side to Tobin Mueller, but then the previous three albums of his that I am already familiar with each show so many sides of the artist, musically speaking, that the sentence hardly does him justice. But it does highlight two aspects of his work.
The first is his willingness, not to mention his deftness and talent, to rework and reinterpret other people’s music, as well as his own and do so in a way that brings something new to the table. But you couldn’t call yourself a jazzman and not revel in such adventure and challenge. Secondly, it shows the more chilled side of his output, but you got that from the title, right? We have seen how great he is at building layers of tone and texture, deftly interlocking sounds, and creating wonderfully ornate musical weaves. Now, we see how good he is with the opposite. With space, understatement and restraint.
The opening salvo, Come In Funky, sets the tone. A slinky but spacious blend of breezy and beguiling brass stabs dancing across the liquid loveliness of Tobin’s piano, which is, in turn, underpinned by wandering, melodic bass lines. Although the album, true to his jazz view of the world, contains many reworkings, First Contact is a totally new composition, a delicate and rich piece based loosely around the musical motif of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mikie Martel’s trumpet coiling and threading its way through the restrained sonics below.
Falling Through the Clouds is again the epitome of musical space, which allows each instrument to be framed and heard perfectly and for additional atmospheres and pool and percolate in the gaps between the fading of one note and the ushering in of the next. Whilst music can be carefully composted and planned and played, there is always an additional sonic hand at work in the finished piece, something more than the sum of the parts of the piece. All you have to do is leave enough space for it to rise to the surface. And that is true of this album as a whole.
Blue sees him pay tribute to Joni Mitchell’s album of the same name, reworking some of the riffs and motifs found on her now classic “break-up album”, and similarly, he also revisits his earlier take on Moon River/Over the Rainbow and expands on these ideas to create a lovely, understated (mainly) piano meditation. Beautiful indeed. And Rubber Submarine sees him treating The Beatles to the same musical exploration as he does with Joni Mitchell.
There are some reworkings of songs better associated with pop culture, such as a gracious take on Dylan’s Shelter From the Storm, music garnered from more traditional folk realms, such as Danny Boy, and there is room for the likes of Hoagy Carmicheal and George Gershwin too.
But what I love about Tobin Mueller the most is his understanding that songs, especially his own, are journeys rather than destinations, and there is no way of knowing when or where that journey ends. It is such an attitude, which means that he is always ready and willing to add the next step to the story of a song. To have it pass through new sonic realms and unexpected genres, to have it change and evolve over the years. This is both a brave and clever thing to do. I wish more artists would be this adventurous, this adaptable and this un-precious about their music.
find out more about Tobin Mueller HERE
[…] now, my experience of Tobin Mueller is as an artist who communicates his thoughts and ideas through instrumental music. This can often […]