Bear Proof, the new release from bassist/composer Todd Sickafoose and my first encounter with his work, offers a chamber music adventure in an exhilarating jazz setting, featuring eight exceptional, genre-fluid musicians and a deep, articulate, and arresting compositional voice.
Todd Sickafoose
Bear Proof (Secret Hatch Records)
A review
When I saw the names of band members on the press release for composer Todd Sickafoose’s new release, Bear Proof, I knew I would be listening to it. In addition to Sickafoose on bass, the project includes seven of the most innovative and fearless musicians in the jazz/art music/whatever-you-want-to-call-it scene: Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Kirk Knuffke (cornet), Jenny Scheinman (violin), Adam Levy (guitar), Rob Reich (accordion), Eric Deutsch (piano), and Allison Miller (drums). My expectations were surpassed, and now I will need to explore the entire Sickafoose oeuvre.
Bear Proof offers a musical experience that is as visceral as it is abstract, as accessible as it is complex, as deeply felt as it is deeply thoughtful, and wonderfully original. The 62-minute, nine-track album is played straight through, and except for a couple of minor fixes, is delivered as played, carrying the energy of a live performance. Sickafoose says that much of the music is extrapolated from the four 3-note phrases that are heard in the opening piece, “The Gold Gate.” He’s quite an extrapolator. At times, the unusual and potently expressive harmonies seemed to come from a new tonal system, something between the cracks of the standard diatonic scale, either dreamed up by Sickafoose or beamed down from the Mother Ship—all of it intensified by his extraordinary command of sonic texture and the adventurous and disciplined playing of each musician. What ears they have.
The music, which feels like a series of short, connected stories indirectly told, touches on multiple genres. You’ll hear tinges of funk (“Flush”), Latin (“Switched On”), country and western as well as blues (“Magnetic North”), R&B (“Boom Bust Startup Ruin”), Asian country and western (“Turns Luck”—who knew that was even a genre), and more or less straight-ahead modern jazz more or less everywhere. Every tune develops organically, and surprises are everywhere. Highlights abound—boy howdy, the entire album is a highlight—but I have to mention the sublimely loopy clarinet solo from Goldberg on “Flush” and Knuffke’s achingly beautiful cornet on “Prospects.”
Sickafoose says in his notes that the project could be interpreted as a “surreal meditation on BOOM and BUST,” but he leaves the door open for your individual reflections. (Can someone tell me what the album’s name is meant to convey? I’m drawing a blank.) It occurs to me that the project has as much to do with boom and bust as it does with the Big Bang and entropy, or the growth and decline of the United States, with the “Reverse Fortune” of its wondrous “Prospects.”
Make of it what you will, but you are in for an ear-opening journey. (Available on Bandcamp, September 29.)
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© 2023 Mel Minter
great observations and sentences MEL ! wow ———— I gather this will not be a CD release?
Just saw your comment, Mark. For some reason, I’m not getting notices that a comment is waiting approval. There is a CD available on Bandcamp
My new friend, Lynne, who shares my passion for baseball, music, and bicycling, found this information about the title on Bass magazine:
“The title BEAR PROOF has more than one meaning, though it might initially call to mind camping safety (bear canisters, etc.). As a California native now based in Eugene, Oregon, Sickafoose has some experience in that regard. But BEAR PROOF is also meant in the sense of withstanding downturn: ‘It’s that thing that protects you from the bad times, a skin you put on.’ ”
https://bassmagazine.com/artists/bassist-and-composer-todd-sickafoose-to-release-new-album-bear-proof
Seems embarrassingly obvious now.