Ches Smith and We All Break - Path of Seven Colors (2021)

Here’s the album that shows just why the nondescript term “drummer” doesn’t get near the chemistry of earworm hooks, sharp-end jazz innovation and global-musical openness of New York percussionist/composer Ches Smith. With saxophonist Tim Berne (a big compositional influence), John Zorn, violist Mat Maneri and many others, Smith has blossomed from skilful sideman to the collaborative original behind this exhilarating set – drawing on his devoted study of Haiti’s Vodou musical traditions with New York’s Haitian-American community, and in empathic hybrid lineups joining Haitian performers and jazz-rooted improvisers.

A 2015 quartet version of this venture is included in a brimming package, but 2020’s We All Break octet is the main attraction – a lineup including the evocative vibrato of vocalist Sirene Dantor Rene, three master hand drummers (including Smith’s Haitian teacher Daniel Brevil, whose originals form much of the repertoire), dynamic young double bass newcomer Nick Dunston, and scintillating jazz interventions from the fiery Miguel Zenón and Matt Mitchell on alto sax and piano respectively.

Sometimes the jazz players quietly shadow the songs, as Mitchell and Smith do around Sirene Dantor Rene’s gracefully tender unfolding of the opener, Woule Pou Mwen. Vocal exchanges between solo singers and chorus clamour over coolly elastic drum grooves on Here’s the Light, before switching to blazing Zenón sax breaks; Mitchell’s teeming free-piano improv uncannily mirrors the drummers’ wilful groove-bends all over the set, while sinister piano vamps drive angular, staccato horn melodies right out of the Tim Berne guidebook into anguished free-sax squeals on the hypnotic Women of Iron.

Smith wanted the resources of traditional vocalists, highly melodic drummers and melody-instrument jazz improvisers to become spontaneously inseparable on this long-honed adventure. We All Break have made a tour de force of it.