Two artists new to me, alto saxophonist Randal Despommier and pianist Chris Pattishall, bring it with their debut recordings as leaders. The soulful Despommier’s five originals and two covers offer a playlist of his life in multiple genres, while Pattishall recasts Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite in a faithful but near hallucinatory quintet-plus-one version.

Randal Despommier
Dio C’è (Outside In Music)
A review
Alto saxophonist Randal Despommier, a Louisiana native, brings an unusually wide range of musical experience to Dio C’è, his debut album as a leader—from playing Mardi Gras parade music to funk, R&B, and jazz gigs in New Orleans to serving as choir director and organist at Boston University Catholic Center and directing the A.M.E. Church of Zion choir in Cambridge, MA, and a community choir in San Martino, Italy. He brings all those musical interests to life on Dio C’è, with a lyricism and musicality that lies somewhere between the suavity of Paul Desmond and the intensity of David Binney. On the six originals and two covers, he is supported by an admirable cohort: Jason Yeager (piano, Rhodes, organ), Aaron Holthus (bass), and Rodrigo Recabarren (drums), plus guest artists Aubrey Johnson (vocals), Oskar Stenmark (flugelhorn), Ben Monder (guitar), and Jimmy Haslip (bass).

Despommier delivers clean, uncluttered, well-structured improvisations in an expressive, singing tone. There’s a joyful inflection in “Giorgia” and in “SoHo Down,” which features a burning alto solo, while Despommier ponders a special loss in “Saying Goodbye,” which Yeager deepens with a telling touch of dissonance in his accompaniment. Further on, Yeager beautifully reprises the tune solo on “’Bye Butterfly.” Stenmark’s flugelhorn and Yeager’s Rhodes grace the funky “Brother Nature.”

The stunning title track, which translates “God Exists,” references a graffito that Despommier spied on various exit signs across Italy and which signifies a place to buy heroine. It opens with a smooth groove that gives way to a wake-up call of an alto solo that burns at both ends of the candle. Refuge comes in the form of a vocal quartet—Johnson, Allegra Levy, Tomás Cruz, and Patrick Laslie—that delivers a surprising and spellbinding chorale that ultimately delivers peace. In the liner notes, Despommier describes the composition as an autobiographical suite that chronicles his “journey, struggles, search for peace, and joy of the finding it in rituals, places, and people who have lifted me to higher places.”

Another highlight is the cover of Stone Temple Pilots’ “Big Empty,” with a ferocious appearance by guitarist Ben Monder. He and Despommier slalom through tight solos, and the track achieves what Despommier calls “beautiful distortion.”

Despommier’s compositions and his playing are direct, unpretentious, and expressive. Dio C’è delivers the goods with a welcome and refreshing buoyancy.

Chris Pattishall
Zodiac Suite (indie)
A review
Pianist Chris Pattishall’s Zodiac Suite offers a vivid reimagining of pianist/composer Mary Lou Williams’ remarkable composition, which Williams recorded solo and accompanied by bassist Al Lucas and drummer Jack Parker in 1945. Pattishall has arranged the 12-part jazz suite for a five-piece ensemble that includes himself on piano, Riley Mulherkar on trumpet, Ruben Fox on saxophones, Marty Jaffe on bass, and Jamison Ross on drums—plus producer Rafiq Bhatia, who contributes tasteful and enlivening sound design and programming.

Each of the composition’s 12 parts were written for friends of the composer—“Taurus” for Duke Ellington, “Aries” for Ben Webster and Billie Holiday, “Capricorn” for the dancer Pearl Primus, and so on. The music combines gospel, blues, 20th-century classical harmonies drawn from a palette that ranges from Enrique Granados to Igor Stravinsky, swing—you name it—and sounds as modern and dazzling today as it must surely have when Williams, who appears to have been somewhat ahead of her time, released her recording 76 years ago.

Pattishall revels in the surprising turns the music takes, Williams’ poetic command of dissonance, and the wide range of feeling that the suite encompasses. His arrangements—and the contributions of Bhatia—bring an iridescent vivacity to Williams’ already lively and colorful compositions.

Highlights abound: “Taurus” starts off in a sentimental mood but ends somewhere much more jungly, with some out-there harmonies. The suave, songlike “Virgo” swings lightly on its feet, while the dreamy “Libra” all but demands a choreographer. The sinuous, languid “Scorpio,” with its Latin tinge, was choreographed by Katherine Dunham—and is that a Monk quote I hear? (Williams’ influence on Monk, and vice versa, is evident throughout.) Pattishall goes luminous on “Sagittarius,” the swinging bop of “Aries” ends in chaos, and poor “Leo” gets a good-natured mocking with a pianistic fanfare that is as pompous as, well, only a Leo can be.

Imaginative and beautifully balanced, Chris Pattishall’s Zodiac Suite is pure pleasure.

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© 2021 Mel Minter