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Moppa Elliott / Advancing on a Wild Pitch — Disasters Vol. 2
(Hot Cup Records no#, 2024, CD / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2024-09-05

Disasters Vol. 2 Cover art

A few years ago, I wrote about Moppa Elliott’s triple album set Jazz Band / Rock Band / Dance Band, and one of the parts (Jazz Band) was called Advancing on a Wild Pitch. The ensemble was a quintet of Elliott on bass, Danny Fox on piano, Christian Coleman on drums, Charles Evans on baritone sax, and Sam Kulik on trombone. Then in 2022, one of Elliott’s other groups, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, released an album called Disasters Vol. I, with compositions based on the theme of Pennsylvania locations which have experienced some kind of tragedy. Disasters Vol. II features the musicians from Advancing on a Wild Pitch on another set of Pennsylvania tunes with the same theme. The liner notes provide the history lessons, so I’ll stick to the music here. In the scope of Moppa Elliott’s career, this set sticks to the purely non-electronic side, and the seven tracks provide grooving slices of jazz that could easily have come from the 50s or 60s. But this is lively stuff without a hint of nostalgia to it. When they dive into a gritty blues like “The Donora Smog,” it’s all totally fresh sounding, not five guys rehashing a traditional style. Elliott’s arrangements for the two horns are both imaginative and tasty, and they’re both excellent soloists. The combination of bari sax and trombone may not be a common one, but it works superbly — both instruments are thought of as operating in the lower register, but are in fact capable of a large range of pitches. And the piano is there to cover the high notes anyway. It almost feels wrong to enjoy music with titles that bring up so much suffering, but Elliott does provide us with some comfort in the notes, affirming that the titles live on a different level than the music. They are evocative on the surface, and they might well spur research into the stories behind them, but the music is not really meant to depict the disasters — it represents the human capacity to carry on in the aftermath of suffering. In any case, Disasters Vol. II is an outstanding jazz album, another in a long string of triumphs for Moppa Elliott.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Matthew "Moppa" Elliott

More info
http://advancingonawildpitch.bandcamp.com/album/disasters-vol-2

 

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