When it comes to clarinet players in jazz today, the pickings are superficially slim. The Downbeat polls (both of readers and of critics) find Anat Cohen stomping all opposition, three-to-one. Once a staple of jazz big bands, the clarinet lost its lustre in the days of bebop, and in the new century, the horn tends to sound like a throwback, but there’s no good reason that it should. Clarinetist Virginia MacDonald is here with a debut album to make the case.
MacDonald is from Toronto, Canada, but she now lives in New York, and In Search Of… boasts a first-call supporting band from her new town: Geoff Keezer on piano, bassist Ira Coleman, and Curtis Nowosad (a fellow Canadian transplant) on drums. If you dial up the title track, you get the rhythm section playing a hip, modern arrangement for a MacDonald original. This song is swinging but sly, featuring her unsentimental but gorgeous sound. Her solo is fluid yet sharp, zaging in conversation with the drums yet also creamy.
MacDonald’s brilliance on her horn is that she sounds of the moment. On her composition “Retrogression”, she blazes through a highly syncopated stop-time theme that mixes the melodic angles of Thelonious Monk with a tricky, up-to-the-second form. The band swing hard behind her, but each soloist plays with post-bop freedom. On “Up High, Down Low”, Keezer plays a gorgeous solo piano introduction. Then MacDonald enters with a sumptuous ballad, but this is one of the performances that also features vocalist Laura Anglade, who sings wordlessly in close alignment with the clarinet.
This decision to incorporate Anglade’s voice (on two tracks) is brilliant, giving the clarinet a slightly offbeat foil while also drawing out the human colors in the leader’s sound. Without the voice, “Up High, Down Low” is a smoky, minor song in swaying triple meter, but Anglade turns the theme mysterious and slightly alien. Before MacDonald’s solo, the piano plays syncopated three-note figures, which the two voices then echo in a call-and-response style. The improvisation, then, continues in a back-and-forth manner, with the clarinet trying to solve the mystery of the tune in conversation with Keezer’s piano. Anglade’s vocal returns for the last bars of the solo, holding a high note and daring MacDonald to jump up to it.
Voice and horn also work together on the opening track, “Last Call at Dimitri’s”, a bopping melody made up mostly of jagged unison (with each other and with the piano) lines that sawtooth upward and inward, often in playful stop-time. MacDonald takes a long solo that lays out her musical intelligence. Though she (almost) never strays from harmonic logic, the solo is knotty and daring, acrobatic and witty. The sheer, sometimes almost cool, synth-like nature of MacDonald’s tone is an ideal and ironic fit to improvisations that surprise and delight because they are unpredictable.
Though Virginia MacDonald works with a relatively traditional rhythm section on her debut, the small ways that she incorporates modern sounds or complex phrasing remind me of the clarinet sensation of the 1990s, Don Byron. (Byron has been relatively quiet recently, but I recommend his last recording from 2018 with pianist Aruán Ortiz, Random Dances and (A)tonalities.) Like Byron, MacDonald finds the horn’s path toward cool, assertive modernity without erasing its historical expressiveness and power as a gentle voice.
In Search Of… includes two performances of ballad tempo composed by others. MacDonald plays a three-minute unaccompanied cadenza to enter “Stardust”, showing that her clarinet has the daring Sonny Rollins brought to the tenor saxophone. She plays the song up on a high wire, accompanied only by Ira Coleman’s bass. “Duke Ellington‘s Sound of Love” is the daring choice for a second duet “standard”. Charles Mingus wrote this for his last working quintet (it appears on Changes One from 1974), a band that included the unique pianist Don Pullen. MacDonald and Keezer bring Pullen to mind, playing with big slabs of emotion that are not afraid to lean into dark clusters of notes or moments of dissonance.
Keezer is just as good or better on “Eternal Return of the Same”. He plays close unison with the clarinet on the theme and then explodes for a thrilling solo. Sometimes the pianist voices his accompanying chords so ingeniously that they sound like a guitar. Still, at other times his playing is a dizzying two-handed argument that takes your breath away.
The hardest-hitting track is “Hope”, with criss-crossing rhythms that remind me of the scintillating compositions on Wynton Marsalis‘ best early album, Black Codes from the Underground. Nowosad’s groove is aggressive and complex in the style of Jeff Watts (via Elvin Jones), constantly implying a busy double-time that Coleman plays across with fast-moving Latin-tinged swing. Keezer, the leader, and Nowosad all solo as if they are in the last round of a heavyweight bout.
That is what makes this stunning debut from a young clarinetist so whap-pow-bam. Are clarinet-centric recordings supposed to be this aggressive and breathtaking? Well, sure, why not? Particularly when In Search Of… is equally capable of providing lush joys and sensitive ballad playing during which MacDonald shades the tone of her horn with subtle bends and turns.
At the very end of the Mingus interpretation, for example, she quavers, gets low in her register, draws on the wood sound of the clarinet, and then pipes up higher again. Virginia MacDonald finds the full range of sound in her instrument, making us wonder why there are not a dozen or more young jazz clarinetists out there, as there are among trumpeters, saxophonists, guitarists, and pianists. I’m not suggesting that she is making it look easy, but she sure is making it sound wonderful.