Music Review: Alejandro Flórez – ‘Beaches of Riches’

Jazz and his Colombian heritage help seed composer-guitarist Alejandro Flórez‘s collaborations with saxophonist Dan Blake and drummer Satoshi Takeishi. Their juiced new album Beaches of Riches documents the fruit of their efforts during the 2010s. Written sections interlock with improvisatory passages to create a fascinating sound world.

The sharp-edged opening track, “Darién,” bursts out of the gate with a shriek, then quickly finds the musicians trading accents and tempting the gods of chaos as Blake improvises over loping guitar ostinatos. New York-based Takeishi, who has a Colombian phase in his background too, steps up with gutsy jazz-rooted beat-making.

“Ripples” applies the same philosophy to a quieter realm. It begins in a fog of guitar noodling. A cymbal cloud from Takeishi introduces the dominant rhythm and theme, with Flórez again undergirding Blake’s melodic gestures with subtly evolving figurations that repeat and mutate. Wobbly electronic effects and wiggly sax improvisations dance through a spacey interlude as the guitar scatters its ostinatos into bits. The repeating figures work their way back in for an energetic crescendo.

The spirit of free-jazz improvisation hovers over both tracks, but with a wink: The music follows interior rules and cycles that become more apparent as you listen. That formula holds in the album’s heart, the seven-movement “Beaches Suite.” Here Flórez’s vision flowers in a broad variety of colors and imaginative rhythms.

Musical Riches

The suite starts with the staccato angles of “Beaches of Riches.” The music challenges the listener to follow its meticulously plotted time changes and alternating synchrony and counterpoint.

The moody “Grey Sea” dispenses with hard rhythm, opening with digitally enhanced atmospheric effects and cushiony guitar wanderings. Unison themes and sudden, pointed jabs arise. These give way to an improvisatory section, during which a repeated sequence of jazzy chord changes creates a solid footing. From this dichotomy we flow back into the thematic material, whose wide intervals derive, like much of the suite, from the raw matter of the first movement. The chord sequence re-imposes itself for a firm finish.

“Mad Crabs” sandwiches a frenetic improvisatory central section between funky, off-kilter rhythmic segments that almost want to turn into a 1970s-sitcom theme song. Then the tiny “Beaches II,” free but also riffed, compresses everything the suite is about into a mere 38 seconds.

In the contemplative “Moralist” Blake subtly explores the saxophone’s timbral and technical possibilities over dreamy floating chord progressions. The suite’s essential thematic material makes an appearance at the end, until a major-seventh ends the piece – a wee jazzy joke.

The propulsive, almost danceable “Energy Within” features a buzzy guitar/drums double solo that evolves into aggressive trio development. (This bass-playing writer had fun imagining holding down a walking bass line under the crackling, half-swing half-funk beat.)

The suite’s final piece, “Beaches III,” starts off disconcertingly with a sense of chaos. Written material asserts itself halfway through, and the suite gets an abrupt and intelligible finish: closure.

Controlled Chaos

The unsettling “Monument 10” repeatedly suggests rhythm and melody, only to wrest them out of our grasp. It’s perhaps the most ragged-sounding track; yet, especially towards the finish, clearer imagery, however angular, is always to be found on a close listen. It was written in 2012, just before the Beaches suite, and shows the trio gelling marvelously as the composer developed the vision that’s clarified fully in the suite.

The album ends with the satisfying punch of “Waves,” a carefully structured distillation of the methods that inform the whole album: unison passages built of thematically linked intervals and chords, historically informed improvisation, unconventional but diggable rhythms, and an overall sense of controlled chaos.

Those of us who’ve been around for a while might discern parallels with experimental groups and sounds of the past, from free jazz and the 20th-century avant-garde to King Crimson and the drums/space interludes of Grateful Dead concerts. But this album reveals Flórez as one of our more original musician-composers, with a definite 21st-century vibe. He’s uniquely skilled at interlocking written music with group improvisation in song-length tracks that leave us bopping our heads and scratching them at the same time.

Beaches of Riches is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.