Adam O’Farrill is a spectacular trumpet player and a sympathetic bandmate who plays with some of the best musicians in jazz, including Mary Halvorson, Anna Webber, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Hiromi. His projects as a leader have been full of imagination and strong composition. The quartet he led called Stranger Things was, of course, cinematic and sweeping. I thought that the band’s Visions of Your Other was one of the best jazz recordings of 2021, and O’Farrill was still in his mid-20s at the time.
Elephant is O’Farrill’s most engaging and impressive recording to date. His trumpet absolutely pops into your ears for several reasons: his sound and approach have matured in recent years; these compositions and their recording give him a true leading role for the first time; and the trio he has assembled here is breathtaking. In executing eight O’Farrill originals, the quartet find eight thrilling ways to create atmosphere and jazz momentum, without ever seeming to fall back on old habits.
No Elephant has ever been this nimble and dancing. The album pops and jabs, hops and slithers. It has all the moves.
The opener, “Curves and Convolutions”, is as exciting as new jazz can be. Pianist Yvonne Rogers plays a fast set of repeated arpeggios as bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Russell Holzman play a set of off-kilter syncopated jabs beneath her. O’Farrill joins the party with Duke Ellington-sounding yelps and cries before doubling the piano part. The composition halts and then unfolds in stops and starts, with the trumpet colored in reverb and O’Farrill adding some Fender Rhodes electric piano around the edges. The band improvise together, atmospherically, building intensity together with the leader on top, but never alone; all four are creating in the moment.
In contrast, “Herkimer Diamond” features Adam O’Farrill’s harmon-muted horn over a flowing feeling. Holzman plays a hip-hop groove as trumpet and piano paint in counterpoint before the first “solo” goes to Stinson’s bass. The composition is as much in the graceful accompanying figures of piano and trumpet. Rogers never stops finding ingenious counterlines, and then O’Farrill takes a heroic solo with his open horn, finding growls, broken tones, and low flutters along the way. Again, the reverb effect on O’Farrill’s trumpet is lush, even as the drum figure remains dry and quick. The sound of the band, together, is rich.
The ambitious center of Elephant is its “Sea Triptych”. Part 1 (“Along the Malecon”) uses an irregular, syncopated time signature, with Rogers’ piano toggling between its medium and low registers as O’Farrill uses repeated notes, again processed with an echo effect, to be equally at play in the rhythm section’s groove. “The Three of Us, Floating” follows, with the piano now taking on the role of playing a repeated-note figure. Some listeners will hear a bit of Steve Reich-ian minimalism here, maybe mixed with trumpet effects that start as an echo of Miles Davis but evolve into something more synthesized and spacey. It is hypnotic and beautiful.
The triptych finishes with “Iris Murdoch” (named for the Irish novelist and Booker Prize winner). Stinson plays a fast, repeated figure in 7/8 time; Holzman, in lockstep but messier, sounds like Danny Richmond, in tune with Charles Mingus. The theme is rich in suspense and intrigue.
If you want a more straight-ahead groove, there is “Eleanor’s Dance”, which uses a backbeat in common time but lies against a contrasting time. O’Farrill is, after all, the son and grandson of two brilliant Afro-Cuban composers. The groove here is more like funk, with muted trumpet playing a simple figure on top. Rogers’ piano alternates between a very regular line in the upper range and some earthy chords — and no one solos. Instead, it is three minutes of an entrancing dance feeling.
The longest performance here is “The Return”. It shifts moods very cinematically, tying together ideas melodically. A quick counterpoint between trumpet and acoustic piano, for example, slides into a sloooow funk that puts O’Farrill’s horn on top of delicious, shimmering synth chords, with the melodic lines related. Episodes with different textures and conversational elements follow, not the least of which is a wild piano solo for Rogers that sounded to me like some of the finest early and “free” playing by Chick Corea. That said, the solo grows unaccompanied, winds down like a clock that needs winding, and then flows into a gorgeous chordal section, with the pianist’s left hand taking on a dark melody.
There is one “bonus track” not written by O’Farrill but, rather, by Japanese composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto. Adam O’Farrill’s arrangement is heartbreaking and dramatic. He uses electronics to harmonize his horn as it plays the theme. Influenced by jazz musicians, Sakamoto worked in experimental electronics and soundtrack composition, both of which were interests of O’Farrill. This performance is music you will want to return to again and again. The interplay between piano and bass evokes the Bill Evans Trio.
Like so much of Elephant, this track is rich in various echoes of jazz history, but it could only have been made at this moment as well. It is propelled by rhythms that, say, Paul Motian was not steeped in, and it connects to other tracks here, with their thrumming grooves (check out the indie-rock propulsion of “Thank You Song”) and refusal to turn into a tedious series of individual “jazz solos”.
For all of these modern elements, Adam O’Farrill’s new Elephant always finds ways to achieve the rhythmic propulsion and conversational give-and-take of the best jazz. The feeling is similar to what Brandon Woody achieved on his Blue Note debut last year, For the Love of It All. Still, O’Farrill’s dynamic range is greater, and the imagination of the interplay of improvisation in this group is more varied and brilliant.
This band and their music are beautiful and exciting, an extension of a grand lineage. Adam O’Farrill is dancing the music forward.