CD Review: Carlos Jimenez, Arriving

Flute is a scary instrument; jazz flute doubly so. Too often flute players fall back on either candy sweetness or the tired breath tricks that Ian Anderson has been doing with Jethro Tull for more than thirty years now. The instrument suffers as well by its overuse in Muzak and tepid soft rock, to the point where people reflexively assign flute music to the "eww" file. For my part, all the great jazz flute players who push my buttons (and that's not many, owing to my own ignorance) are experimenters who use the flute as a tool to explore the outer limits rather than just play some good old straight music.

All this goes triple for Latin jazz flute, where the light tone of the instrument can get buried underneath an avalanche of percussion. It's a neat trick, then, that Yonkers, NY native Carlos Jimenez has pulled off. As a young Latin jazz flutist, he has made an album that leaves the flute front and center, counterbalanced by a rhythm section that for all their propulsion and weight still leave plenty of room for the flute on top. Moreover, Jimenez is a straight-ahead player interested in exploring groove and melody rather than orbiting Neptune on a descending-modal whole tone run. And even though the words "tasteful flute" generally make me want to run screaming for my Slayer albums, he has made a very promising debut album, titled Arriving.

Jimenez' tone is light and airy, about as far from the round caramel sweetness of classical flute as it's possible to get, and he has developed a voice as a soloist that makes the most of this lightness. He sometimes leaves phrases open ended, building up questioning statements for bars at a time before tying them together again. Although he is young (and plays young), his ideas have enough meat on them to promise a lot of room for him to develop as a player.

His band backs him up in style with great comping and tight rhythms that balance the Latin and jazz sides of their sound nicely. Bassist Geoff Brennan in particular skips across the beat with a feel that digs in like Stanley Clarke but bounces like a salsa band. The percussion line of Hilton Ruiz (piano), Guillermo Jimenez (timbales), Aryam Vazquez (congas) and Adam Weber (drum kit) keep Brennan tied to earth with knotty and dense rhythms that smolder and spark. In particular, Ruiz' solos and tartly dissonant comping fill in harmonic and rhythmic details beautifully, and the occasional backbeat fill from Weber sometimes send things in a welcome bebop direction.

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

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