The latest release from saxophonist Chris Jonas, backwardsupwardsky (from his Music from the Deserts series), offers two CDs, two trios, one quartet, and 14 tracks of compellingly quirky Jonas compositions performed with stunning concision, inspired improvisation, and apparently effortless virtuosity.
Saxophonist and composer Chris Jonas works well in solitude. Over the course of three Januarys’ solo camping expeditions of two or three weeks in the 2 million–acre Barry Goldwater Missile Range in Arizona during the pandemic, he composed the engaging music on his latest release, backwardsupwardsky.
Saxophonist and composer Chris Jonas also works well with others. The album features three excellent ensembles: a trio in Santa Fe, where Jonas is based, with Jeremy Bleich (electric bass and electronics) and Milton Villarrubia III (drums); a trio in Oakland with Lisa Mezzacappa (double bass) and Jason Levis (drums); and a quartet in Bologna with Luca Serrapiglio (baritone sax and contra alto clarinet), Luca Bernard (double bass), and Giacomo Pisani (drums).
Jonas’s music colors outside the lines while cannily acknowledging that the lines exist, and it does so with a loose-limbed playfulness and a healthy dose of optimism that invite and delight the listener’s attention. His quirky melodies feel like they could land in any of a thousand different places, but they always find destinations that are as inevitable as they are surprising and that retroactively codify the path that got them there.
Given Jonas’s musical associations over the years, with such luminaries as William Parker, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton, it’s no suprise that his compositional approach is nontraditional. His musical language is typically not based on harmony. “I try very hard not to think about harmony,” he says. “When I think about harmony before I write something, it flattens it. I usually don’t end up utilizing any of those pieces because they’re just not interesting enough.”
Instead, on backwardsupwardsky, the language is based on melodic ideas that are ingeniously combined in a variety of patterns. “Sometimes, I’ll have a phrase that’s stuck in my head for a few days, and it’s rolling around there, and little by little, it actually takes some form, and I’ll finally write it down and say, ‘Okay, here’s that thing.’ Maybe a week later—a totally independent, unrelated moment—and I find myself making something else,” he explains.
“And then there’s a third moment where I realize I could put that first thing and that other thing together, and I don’t know, I’m not going to actually let myself even think about what they’re related to, if they’re related in terms of key or anything else,” says Jonas. “But I’ll stick them next to one another. . . . Or sometimes, they sit right on top of each other. I can use one in the bass line, and I can use the other as a melody, even though they’re in totally different keys. Because they’re repeating, they’ve formed their own kind of relationship that because there’s no chordal instrument, they actually form almost by mistake a melodic and harmonic progression.”
There is a craft to knowing what and how such elements can fit together, and Jonas is a past master at constructing and manipulating these forms in a musically coherent and moving expression.
He expresses gratitude for living in a time when composers from Beethoven to Myra Melford have been experimenting with bimodality, “where there’s an acceptance by the audience, by the listeners, by a fellow musician for what we used to call ‘dissonance,’ ” he says. He notes that “sometimes technically what happens when you have two unlike phrases who sit together, they find their own relationship, and therefore, they also find their own conclusion.” You can hear an example of exactly that toward the end of “Teabag,” where two lines that seem to be at odds with one another ultimately join in an ecstatic union that is so satisfying to the ear.
That’s just one of many gratifying moments on the album. Check out the two lines rubbing along together on the album opener, “Josh Tune”; “Melodica 6,” a short solo piece on melodica recorded by the campfire one evening that is a study in harmonic refraction; the mind-boggling high-speed improv from Jonas on “Green”; the mesmeric “Nature Trail”; the touch of funk in “Rump Most”; and the sublimely loopy “Windy Josh,” which closes the album.
The music is adventurous, occasionally delirious, sometimes hilarious, and always accessible, and as often as not, it will raise a smile.
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