Alexa Tarantino - Clarity (2020), CD, Posi-Tone PR8211

 

As a sign of how far jazz has fallen in popularity since the 1960s, the top 10 jazz albums in sales for 2020 as compiled by Billboard magazine were all by Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Norah Jones, and Michael Buble. Robert Glasper managed to sneak in at #11, but the rest of the top 20 is more Buble, Sinatra, Norah Jones, as well as Kenny G and Harry Connick, Jr., Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts Christmas Album, and Dave Brubeck's Time Out. In other words, contemporary instrumentalists don't sell. Even landmark labels like Blue Note and Verve release very little contemporary instrumental jazz, and a 2016 CNN article by John Blake, "When Jazz Stopped Being Cool," argues that jazz musicians themselves in the later 1960s and beyond made music for themselves, too esoteric for the general populace, while record company accountants found that rock albums could sell multiples of the most popular jazz titles and began to drop jazz artists as a result. Blake concludes that jazz has gone the way of classical music--still practiced in the conservatory but virtually ignored elsewhere. Yet there are still smaller jazz-focused record labels that continue to churn out albums by contemporary performers on a regular basis, and there is a consistent audience for jazz, though much smaller than in its heyday. One of those current labels is Posi-Tone, based in Los Angeles and run by producer Marc Free and engineer Nick O'Toole. Posi-Tone cranks out an impressive torrent of newly recorded, largely traditionally focused jazz by mostly up-and-coming performers, all of them issued on standard CDs. If you're a fan of 1960s era post-bop, most of the Posi-Tone repertoire fits in that space, and they are to be commended for the number of female performers they feature. Alexa Tarantino is one of those female performers--she plays alto sax, soprano sax, and flute, and Clarity is the second of three albums she has released for the label thus far. Her work has been lauded by Jazziz magazine, The New York Times, and she was nominated as a Rising Star on alto by Downbeat in both 2020 and 2021. The kudos are well-deserved: this album and her 2021 follow-up, Firefly, both display her gifts as a composer and performer on all three instruments.

She opens and closes this album on flute, beginning with her brooding minor-key composition "Through" and closing with Kurt Weill's standard "My Ship" delivered as a slower ballad in which each of her accompanists get to solo after she opens the tune accompanied only by bass. The lone track performed on soprano is a cover of Horace Silver's "Gregory Is Here," given a slightly funky rhythm. She delivers some late-night romance on alto on the Latin-tinged "La Puerta" with drummer Rudy Royston switching to bongos for a lighter touch. And there  are several stand-out faster-paced numbers, particularly her compositions "A Race Against Yourself," "A Unified Front," and "Thank You for Your Silence." Tarantino can execute flashy runs or more pensively spaced solos with the best saxophonists past or present. While her style of jazz and that of every album I've heard from Posi-Tone may not break new ground, there's nothing wrong with continuing a tradition that stimulates and satisfies in equal measure.

Do I Really Need This record?  Supporting current musicians, and particularly female musicians, is always a good move, and because Posi-Tone CDs come housed in a razor-thin cardboard sleeve, storage space is never an issue (a real concern I face regularly). But of course, most important is that the music and playing here are top notch--something I know I will pull out again and again in the years to come. So naturally this CD is another must-have.