Chad Taylor Quintet Smoke Shifter

Jazz is music of community, a continually developing social reflection on language and how it connects us creatively. Whether musicians or listeners, we are in constant, immediate conversation about history and development––taking the fractal fabrics of Armstrong, Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Coltrane, or Sun Ra, examining and rearranging them in order to create fresh structures. As the art critic Clement Greenberg said of modernism in his 1960 lecture “Modernist Painting,” “the essence... lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more fully in its area of competence.” These words speak to a dialogue, continually energized and made kinetic, whereby the meat of a form, its language, is in play with time and content. To bring this around to prolific drummer Chad Taylor’s sixth album as a leader, Smoke Shifter, the drummer offers the following: “I just enjoy creating new language, either as a side person or a leader––for me, that’s jazz. If there is such a thing as a definition, it’s the process of creating a new language with people” [my italics].
Known for his work in the Chicago Underground with cornetist Rob Mazurek, as well as projects with guitarists Jeff Parker and Marc Ribot, saxophonists Fred Anderson, Jemeel Moondoc, James Brandon Lewis, and Rob Brown, trombonist Steve Swell, trumpeter jaimie branch, bassist Eric Revis, and multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore, Taylor has assembled a quintet of ‘dialogians’ whose concept of the music is historical, spatial, and localized: trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, tenor saxophonist Bryan Rogers, vibraphonist Victor Vieira-Branco, and bassist Matt Engle. Other than Finlayson, all of the musicians are currently part of or have a strong connection to the scene around Philadelphia, and Rogers and Engle have been working together since 2001.
Taylor now directs the jazz program at Pitt, has been in Philly for close to a decade, and was introduced to these players through common denominators like veteran alto saxophonist Bobby Zankel and Otherly Love Records co-founder Stephen Buono. Buono introduced Taylor to Rogers while Engle he’d known and worked with through Zankel and trombonist Dan Blacksberg. Vieira-Branco had, during the pandemic, taken mbira lessons with the drummer. Taylor recalled that “we didn’t have a trumpet player yet but all four of us got together and started improvising, maybe had a few charts, and immediately it sounded like a band from the first note, so I knew right away that this would work.” Rogers further observed “when it did come together everything just gelled really suddenly. If you were to graph it, it would look like an exponential function. We also were able to play three shows before the recording, so we were feeling comfortable and familiar with each other and the material. We only did one or two takes of everything, so the recording felt in the moment.”
There is a cohesive vision around five players, all unique in their understanding of the jazz landscape but united by context. Partly this is due to the leader’s encouraging contributions to the group’s book (all save Finlayson have compositions on the LP), a practice which carries over from his previous recordings. Taylor chalks this up to his studies with percussionist-composer Joe Chambers, who he linked up with at the New School at age 19. Chambers appears on numerous legendary Blue Note sessions, was in the percussion ensemble M’Boom, and recorded under his own name for labels like Muse, Finite, Baystate,
Denon, and Savant. The second side of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s 1965 LP Components consists of four of Chambers’ works, recorded when he was just 23. Taylor remembers “when I was studying with him he’d say ‘you should always be writing music, and whenever you go into a session, whoever you’re recording with you can say ‘hey, would you mind looking at my composition? Maybe it will work well on your record.’ I took that advice to heart in bands I was in, and when I get opportunities to make my own records I want a group sound but I also want different compositional voices.”
The program of Smoke Shifter includes a pair of Taylor’s pieces, “Waltz for Meghan” and the lilting title track, Engle’s “Avian Shadow” and Vieira-Branco’s “October 26th” and “Paradise Lawns/October 29th” (two distinct tunes linked by a solo drum feature), with Rogers’ “Broken Horse” starting the proceedings. None are simple blowing lines and throughout, the writing and the playing feed each other. Vieira-Branco points out that “there is a cohesion in leadership––even how [Taylor] makes the tunes work together and orders the cuts on the record.” Taylor's perspective is that “in any project I do I gravitate to people who have their own sound and approach. It’s hard to find people who have that individuality and who also work well together.” That’s certainly true throughout Smoke Shifter in which advanced modern jazz arrangements and motifs––not far off from forebears like Chambers or Hutcherson––are central to the quintet’s language, but their movements are utterly contemporary, knotty and often atonal melodies alternately hanging in space or displaying a robust push-pull between surface and support.
“Broken Horse” has a meaty bass line and swinging polyrhythms set against burnished unison horns, the saxophonist’s gruff clamber circling around snatches of melody as vibraphone, bass, and drums churn and refract. Rogers remarks that “I wrote this song specifically for the group. I also had some idea of the particular character of our playing that I wanted to develop. Writing something that acts as a seed is a pretty good way of doing that, and in that case the content isn't as important as the space and feeling it establishes. So with that goal in mind, the bass line was something that just popped into my head. Once I had that, I just tried to imagine how I thought we would play something compositional over it. What might Victor's chords sound like if I could ask him to play what was in my head? What would the horn line and counter line sound like over it?” The result is a striking introductory cut, an emphatic dance of pulse and motion, burnished trumpet and tenor wheeling and diving, Finlayson an assured foil with nods to Freddie Hubbard and Enrico Rava, while Vieira-Branco’s globular chimes create a web of activity within and across the tune’s center.
The trifecta of Vieira-Branco’s “October 26th” and “Paradise Lawns/October 29th” is a rich bookend, the lilting, mote-filled ballad of the former almost Ra-like in its celestial drift, while the closing suite hinges on cyclical relationships pulled into free play in its first part, ending on a swaying midtempo number with an attractive theme, bridged by a throaty, stippled unaccompanied drum part. As the composer puts forth, “the ballad was not written for the ensemble––I’d tried it in numerous situations but I think it made sense with the horns. I try to avoid looking at things hierarchically so the main melody is in the bass line, and that goes for “Paradise Lawns” as well where the traditional stacking of voices is reversed. I want the low end
up top and the horns to be in a support role.” Taylor further adds that “‘Paradise Lawns’ was challenging to play and we worked a lot to figure out an arrangement. It’s [based on] a very polyrhythmic figure both harmonically and rhythmically––it’s a brilliant piece.”
Engle’s “Avian Shadow” blends compositional rigor and contained ensemble surge; the bassist wrote it “to connect and interlock in specific ways wherein the rhythm becomes as important as the note choices. The idea is to play in such a way that the lines between what is written and what is improvised become harder to define.” Taylor says that it was one of the most difficult pieces on the record to get “right,” but that working towards the performance one hears was an enriching endeavor. The two numbers by Taylor spotlight the fact that he is, as Vieira-Branco remarks, “an excellent composer,” and his gorgeous “Waltz for Meghan,” along with the title track, are a programmatic central hinge. The former contains sections written twenty years apart that were grafted into the final piece––a taut, clattering groove and supple, gliding movements, both carpeting stately, elegiac soli, while “Smoke Shifter” is an angular, keening number that epitomizes directness and motion.
If the tunes and their descriptions sound heady, the result is incredibly swinging and accessible music which isn’t easily defined by either “free” or “hard bop” conventions. Subtle gradients and off-kilter but insistent tempos coalesce and are the roots of Taylor’s sound and that of this band. Smoke Shifter presents an infectious, compelling, grounded and evolving take on modern jazz in the 21st century, and whets the appetite for more.
-Clifford Allen April 2025
The Clement Greenberg quote is from The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume.4. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. P. 85.