A first listen to Passerine, the new quartet album by bassist and composer Stephan Crump, is likely to set you floating in the air. This may seem ironic, given that Crump‘s job, as the musician anchoring the music with his cream-toned acoustic bass, is to ground us. The music on Passerine is a temperate breeze through tree branches. A passerine is one of the 6,500 identified bird species (such as sparrows) whose toe arrangement facilitates perching and nest building. Crump wrote these arrangements for a jazz quartet based on research into bird nest-building techniques.
In addition to Crump’s woody bass tone, the sound of the band is defined by the gentle interweaving of Kenny Warren’s trumpet and David Leon’s flute in the front line, and by percussionist Ches Smith playing an unusual drum kit with no bass drum, no hi-hat cymbals, cloth-muted toms, an unconventional snare drum, and various metal implements. The result is a recording of beautiful aural transparency and delicacy that emphasizes the playfulness and beauty of the written arrangements as well as the invention of its improvisations.
“Twenty-Five”, for example, tiptoes into your ear. Smith sounds like a creeping dawn, with bells and tapped drums suggesting the first rays of light, then Stephan Crump’s simple bass line, with resonance double stops that could be a few hesitant footsteps. Trumpeter Kenny Warren plays a simple mid-range melody in call-and-response with the bass before Leon’s flute enters, playing a pipey line that weaves around the music.
The verb “weave” is important to Passerine, here and elsewhere. The bits of straw and grass that might come together to construct a bird’s nest are loosely woven, but ingenious: holding together with strength and tension. That is the sound of “Twenty-Five”, as the four voices flow together in counterpoint and then, after Leon solos, work in a strong parallel harmony to sound even more solid. Warren solos over a Crump/Smith vamp figure that has a complex rhythmic pattern, a different kind of weaving, that is followed by trumpet and flute playing a fluttering figure in unison, then harmony, leading back to long harmonized tones over a groove.
“Weavers” also puts trumpet and flute in counterpoint over an irresistible (if off-kilter) groove. Smith seems to barely play, even though he is essential, and Crump places the range of Leon’s flute below the trumpet, further emphasizing a sense of open space. As the bass melody, flute, and trumpet curve and dodge around each other (first in the written part, then in improvisation), you hear the nest come together.
It’s hard to imagine a review of Passerine not mentioning its sonic connection to a couple of the tracks from the classic Dave Holland album Conference of the Birds. The band on this timeless ECM album are also a quartet with two horns, bass, and drums. The title track, with both Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton on flute and gentle saxophone, achieves a transparency, beauty, and floating feeling that is common on Crump’s new recording. The Holland composition “Q & A” gives drummer Barry Altschul a chance to skitter and playfully create atmosphere much the way Ches Smith does on Passerine, then opening the sky for alto saxophone, flute, and bass to swoop, dodge, and dart.
That kind of playfulness shows up in Crump’s sinuous “Glide”, which rides on a danceable momentum, and in the swaying “Fly”, one of the two tracks where Leon switches to alto saxophone rather than flute. “Fly” has a bobbing 6/8 feel—a dancing but relaxed triple meter that gusts beneath the horns as they play and converse. Crump and Smith slide over into walking 4/4 here and there, just as easily falling back. It’s a pleasurable listen with a bevy of subtle compositional details.
The opening track, “Stuck”, also uses the alto saxophone, played by Leon with a gauzy tone that buzzes against Warren’s trumpet, in harmony with Stephan Crump’s arco bass at the start of the tune, is hypnotic. Here too, Crump sets up a series of rhythmic patterns that as critical as the melody: a three-against-four lope, a rattling pattern for Smith beneath a creative saxophone solo that sounds like a sermon, then a deeper funk groove that is still light a feather in Smith’s hands.
On this performance, Kenny Warren plays a sublime solo over a half-time bass walk and eventually swings outright. Warren is a New Yorker originally from Denver and a member of the Webber/Morris Big Band, the Angelica Sanchez Nonet, and Crump’s Slow Water band. On Passerine, he often plays with a relaxed Miles-ian open horn sound, but his range as a stylist is broad. The “Stuck” solo is more free, harmonically and sonically. He brings to mind modern trumpet greats Lester Bowie, Wadada Leo Smith, and Don Cherry, but the intelligent cool in this solo also channels the late Ron Miles. This improvisation is both expressive and cohesive, an album highlight.
The other album highlight is the writing and mood of “Bryn”, a slow and melancholy theme carried by Warren as Leon plays simple but perfectly placed flute harmonies in the lower range. Uncharacteristically, Crump steps out with the first solo. This lyrical, brief pizzicato improvisation sets up Leon and then Warren to continue, each playing short, patient lines before the melody returns. Again, Crump brings Dave Holland to mind. He crafts a deeply memorable theme ideally suited to his group.
So, really, isn’t it about time we started thinking about Stephen Crump, in the larger sense, as our era’s Dave Holland—as fine, versatile, and sure-handed a bassist and bandleader? Like Holland relative to Miles Davis, Crump has been a vital sideman for one of the best musicians of his generation, Vijay Iyer. Holland paired as rhythm section with brilliant drummers like Jack DeJohnette, and Crump has been brilliant with talents like Ches Smith and Tyshawn Sorey.
The best part of the comparison is each bassist’s versatility as a bandleader and composer. Holland’s bands go from larger to intimate, from relatively mainstream to the avant-garde. Crump has that kind of range, too. His recent album with saxophonist Darius Jones and drummer Eric McPherson (The Otherlands Trio, Star Mountain) was wholly improvised. Meanwhile, his Rosetta Trio with guitarists Jamie Fox and Liberty Ellman is something closer to a chamber group built on delicate, lyrical interplay. His Rhombal Quartet spans generations, putting the underappreciated saxophone magician Ellery Eskelin alongside the hottest trumpet player under 35, Adam O’Farrill.
In all these settings, like Duke Ellington, Crump writes for the sound (and combined sound) of his bandmates, devising compositions that almost always build atop a rhythmic push-pull feeling that can accelerate or decelerate, grow more intense or more langorous. As a result, his tunes feel like rich environments for exploring sound and feeling. Superb improvisers find room to move around, and listeners also get to enjoy the groove. Stephan Crump is, after all, a native of Memphis, Tennessee.