Pianist Angelica Sanchez is known for her colorfully inventive, often free-leaning post-bop jazz, a style she showcases on her vibrant 2022 trio album
Sparkle Beings. While not her first trio album, it is the first to feature two veteran icons, bassist
Michael Formanek and drummer
Billy Hart. Her creative association with both artists is extensive, going back to 2003 for
Formanek (who played on her debut), and to the '90s for
Hart (whom she met at a
Gunther Schuller jazz workshop while she was a student). Since then, she has worked with
Formanek extensively in various formations. Here, she brings both players together, exploring works by some of her biggest piano influences as well as her own compositions. While Sanchez often plays songs by other composers in her live shows, she rarely records them. This adds to the sense of illumination on
Sparkle Beings, as if Sanchez is opening up a window on her development as an improviser. She takes on
Cecil Taylor's noir-ish fever dream "With (Exit)," diving into the song's sneaky melody as
Formanek and
Hart twirl around her in woozy, bluesy reverie. A similarly spectral atmosphere permeates her spare deconstruction of Mexican pianist
Mario Ruiz Armengol's "Preludio a un Preludio." The pianist's own songs conjure an equally dreamlike quality, as on the title track, which starts with a rhythmic pattern from
Hart that sounds like falling rain filmed in black-and-white before Sanchez and
Formanek enter, adding bird-like color to the scene. Even more evocative, "Phantasmic Friend" is a slow-moving ballad in which Sanchez's dusky chordal harmonies swirl around your head like smoke in a dark cafe.
Particularly compelling is her opening reading of
Mary Lou Williams' "A Fungus Amungus," in which she and trio partners lunge back and forth in off-kilter harmony like a modern dance company. Later, on the closing track, she combines her song "Before Sleep" with
Duke Ellington's "The Sleeping Lady and the Giant that Watches Over Her," a song culled from his 1972 album
The Latin American Suite. Both tracks wryly straddle the line between swinging, urbane bop and the boundary-less free jazz of artists like
Ornette Coleman, a balance Sanchez strikes throughout
Sparkle Beings. ~ Matt Collar