The Westerlies

It is probably safe to assert that this album is unlike any other previously existing recording of brass chamber music. It is not easily apprehended on the first pass, and bears repeated listening. After living with The Westerlies for a month, I am finding new things to appreciate about the recording. There is great musical maturity and depth on display here, produced by relatively young artists. It will be interesting to hear what their collaboration produces in the future.

The Westerlies' compositions overlap with some contemporary classical music genres, but they don't surf the same cultural wave. Each member of the group contributes original compositions that draw on a range of musical idioms, from hot and cool jazz, folk songs and hymns, to European art music and movie soundtracks. And while all of the player-composers have pursued their own individual artistic courses, the compositions they bring to the project share enough similarities in form and idiom to create a unified band sound. The pieces are through-composed mini-suites that do not follow traditional jazz or even post-bop form. There is a conscious exclusion of bebop vocabulary from the improvised passages, a declaration of distinction from jazz as it is generally recognized and taught.

When New York brass quartet the The Westerlies dropped 2014’s Wish the Children Would Come Home (Songlines) they forced me to reevaluate Seattle keyboardist Wayne Horvitz as a composer. The readings trumpeters Riley Mulherkar and Zubin Hensler and trombonists Andy Clausen and Willem de Koch give to the music of their old teacher are extraordinary, and while I praised the group’s stunning technical abilities, rich timbre, and strong arrangements then, their dazzling new eponymous double CD indicates they deserve even more credit. Aside from interpretations of Charles Ives’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and Duke Ellington’s “Where’s the Music?”—as well as an arrangement of the folk tune “Saro” by Sam Amidon and Nico Muhly—the members composed the material, and it’s all knocked me on my ass. There’s no extensive improvisation on these gorgeous pieces, though when they do solo, the players display rigor and a level of execution on par with classic brass ensembles (Mulherkar’s solo on “Where’s the Music?” brings to mind the splendor of Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy at its best). The original repertoire is so strong and varied that the Westerlies represent a kind of bastard child, standing fiercely between genre cracks with works that evoke the Americana of Aaron Copland and John Philip Sousa on the one hand but seeming to translate the rhythmically spastic machinations of EDM on the other (check out “So So Shy”). There are plenty of other stops in between, all delivered with stunning clarity and richness.

Young musicians today routinely resist being pigeonholed into a single genre. Such is the case with this unconventional band, which, through its compositions and tight ensemble playing, reveals a built-in sympathy for improvised jazz, rigorous classical structures and sunshiny pop. Trumpeters Riley Mulherkar and Zubin Hensler and trombonists Andy Clausen and Willem de Koch can blow hard — after all, this is a brass band — but the surprise comes in their soft tones and subtle phrasing.