Recent and satisfyingly edgy releases have come my way from Cowhause and Lux Quartet, featuring some stellar musicians.

Cowhause
Break It Like This (indie)
A review
It’s been 19 years since the first release from Cowhause, the Colorado duo of Janet Feder (mostly baritone guitars and analog, handmade sounds) and Colin Bricker (aka Brokerclinic) (electronic sounds/computer music), but the wait is over at last with the release of the compelling Break It Like This. Feder brings classical training, an appreciation of a wide variety of American music, and a way with vulnerable vocals and heart-piercing, idiosyncratic melodies. Bricker brings an astounding virtuosity with electronically generated sounds and a keen musical instinct, creating “beautiful, twisted, broken soundscapes and skittering rhythms,” to quote the liner notes on the Bandcamp page. (I can’t say it any better.) The music is unclassifiable (you’ll hear blues, rock, folk, jazz, world, classical, avant-garde influences), sometimes unsettling, always surprising, deeply affecting, and beautifully recorded, and it will gently slip you out of your everyday universe. The smooth flow of Feder’s often prepared guitar and her vocals—vocals sometimes passed through an electronic filter—is counterpointed by Bricker’s splendidly deranged rhythmic accompaniments, which place oddly angled frames around Feder’s lines and occasionally take listeners’ feet out from under them. Highlights include the opener, “Opening,” with its abrupt shifts in style and sound and its indistinct foreground and background; the mesmeric, Brokerclinicized version of Feder’s “All Angles and Easy Exits” from her T H I S  C L O S E album (reviewed here); the spacious “I Remember Something,” which attempts to pull in a memory the way one pulls in a distant radio signal; the sumptuous austerity of “Banjo,” with its prepared, um, banjo; and Junior Burke’s haunted “White Men Landing.” Go sailing into another dimension with Cowhause.

Lux Quartet
Tomorrowland (enja-Yellowbird)
A review
Led by pianist Myra Melford and drummer Allison Miller, with saxophonist Dayna Stephens and bassist Scott Colley—all of them contributing composers—the Lux Quartet delivers sophisticated compositions, instrumental virtuosity, and a stunning correspondence among the four musicians—in short, a thoroughly exhilarating master class in modern jazz. From the worried melodic line in the opener, Melford’s “Intricate Drift,” with the pianist stealthily shadowing Stephens, to the fractured swing of Miller’s “Speak Eddie,” with sax and drums pushing each other in new directions, to Colley’s aspirational title track, with the bassist delicately supporting the prismatic dissonance of Melford’s opening lines, the quartet continually breaks into duos and trios, each successive combination casting new light on a composition’s lines. Stephens, to whom I have previously had only limited exposure, proves himself an astute improviser with a commanding voice of his own. Melford creates undulating waves of sound with left and right hand intimately integrated, and as remarkable a soloist as she is, she is equally adept at comping, dropping complementary shards of color behind and around the soloist’s line. The lyrical Colley, with deft rhythmic and melodic choices, keeps the proceedings well grounded and heightens the musical textures and colors. The cleanly propulsive Miller often leads the entire crew into surprising new directions. Her “Congratulations and Condolences,” an ode to parenting, gets top honors for its giddy, near ecstatic frenzy, but every track elicits involuntary yips of surprise and sighs of pleasure.

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