The best music is revealed to itself as it is being played, like a hybrid of colloquial and evangelical speech, occupying the eternal present with the brisk omniscience of defected gods and their emissaries. It’s the music of the deities who decided to become miracles instead of performing them. Unperformable music, that can only be enacted and lived, that was not staged or concertized into spectacle at its inception and might have disappeared forever were it not for recording equipment. The ensembles that play this music risk alienating the kind of audiences that expect gratuitous entertainment. This risk is the sight of the sound’s beauty. Darius Jones has made an operatic album in four movements that uses the layering of strings and drums to invent a lane for his playing that feels carved by destiny and premonition. His alto glides through these original compositions with elusive charm and heroism, and a level of alertness that is almost alarming, because it feels so earned and just. It’s not until almost 7 minutes into the first movement that we hear the horn growl and gnarl just enough to stir the cradle of strings into more intense chatter before they shuttle into some nuance of ballad for the second movement, which takes us from the cheerful to the triumphant. The playing here is gorgeous, but what stands out most is the rigor of the compositions, which feel like tributes to Sun Ra’s call that ‘only the impossible happens.’ Their mood is expansive, gleeful, wistful, sometimes frantic, but so coherent and poised at every turn that all you can do while listening is marvel at this fluency in the language of will and won’t that lives here alone.
