Joe Westerlund Curiosities From the Shift

During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed instudying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so muchAfro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every cornerof jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for itto fit so many forms while retaining it's own essence? The result isaleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies,where Westerlund's clave enthusiasm collides with his texturalexperimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes handswith friends decorating this space alongside him.The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities' first half begins with thejunkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame "Tem"and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos andshakers on "Can Tangle." There is a hard-won joy to these numbers,as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential deadend but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs becamea kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund exploresacross Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener "NuMale Uno" to the uncanny amorphousness of closer "Felt LikeFloating." All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm,like the loping strut at the center of "Midpoint" and the head-noddingpulse that winds through "Persurverance," winkingly misspelled tosuit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those arespringboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the NewAge references-shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiringflutes-that circle through "Midpoint" or the dub-indebted delays andgamelan hymns that bubble up through "Persurverance." This isdeeply multivalent music, each number's propulsive corecounterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetnessand joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here,tangling toward infinity.In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlundreached out to friends-Califone's Tim Rutilli, saxophonist SamGendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenboughand Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughlycomposed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hearwhat happened when his pals responded in real time. They deliveredgrace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains onhidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album's insistenceon groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having livedand worked so long with bands, he assumed he was donefunctioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many ofWesterlund's loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, usingfamiliar elements to render his adventures into the unknown.Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but notbound by them, this is Westerlund's definitive statement so far, thesolo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical andemotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he mightfind.