Dan Weiss is a no-compromises guy. He doesn’t jog occasionally for his health; he trains hard and races. He turned an interest in South Asian music into a decades-long immersion with tabla master Samir Chatterjee. When I suggested to the drummer last week that he struck me as slightly obsessive, his response was unequivocal: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Totally!”
So it’s no surprise that when Weiss has played at BOP STOP, as he will on Thursday, it was in the company of musicians as uncompromisingly dedicated to excellence as he is. Even so, you can make a strong case that his new quartet with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, trumpeter Peter Evans and guitarist Miles Okazaki is on a different level altogether.
Like Weiss, Okazaki loves a challenge. In 2018 he arranged and recorded the complete catalog of Thelonious Monk, for solo guitar, and instrument for which is was was little suited (anyone remember Okazaki’s 2019 BOP STOP concert of those pieces? It was dazzling.).
Peter Evans doesn’t just command the whole of the trumpet language. He pushes it further than seems possible. An Oberlin Conservatory graduate, he was a member of the cheeky jazz band Mostly Other People Do The Killing and thrives in the borderlands of music that are the home base of the exploratory International Contemporary Ensemble.
Scan the personnel list of New York’s most interesting improvised music ensembles and chances are you’ll find Patricia Brennan’s name. Her recordings with guitarist Mary Halvorson’s iridescent Amaryllis sextet and a big band led by drummer John Hollenbeck were among last year’s best. Still, they were topped by Brennan’s own Breaking Stretch (Pyroclastic Records, 2024), the record of the year in the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll—and mine, too.
That’s fast company, but Weiss is no slouch. The New Jersey native is a rhythmic organizer of encyclopedic interests that manifest as broad experience. At BOP STOP alone, he has most recently appeared with a no-horizons piano trio of Jacob Sacks and bassist Thomas Morgan, a mindblowing Even Odds group with alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and pianist Matt Mitchell.
As a leader or co-leader, Weiss has recorded with those formations and in settings as varied as a duo with Okazaki, a 16-piece ensemble that included horns, voice and harp, and his two-keyboards, guitar and bass ensemble Starebaby that he formed to explore a love of metal.
These threads are gathered Unclassified Affections, made with these musicians and released last Friday on Pi Recordings. From the South Indian rhythmic cycle tapped out on cymbal that begins “Plusgood” to the twitchy, near-bebop of “Holotype,” Weiss’s sound palette is vast. This is audacious, boundary-stretching music, fully representative of what pianist Vijay Iyer has called “New Brooklyn Complexity.” Yet he maintains a is base camp in the jazz tradition (don’t ask the usually laconic Weiss about the bebop drummer Philly Joe Jones unless you have a minute)
So don’t be surprised that some of the compositions on Unclassified Affections have the familiar head-solos-head structure that has been around for 100 years. Others are based on a bassline like a 17th-century passacaglia (“I’m a Bach fanatic,” Weiss, also a pianist, said. “Just the chance to be able to play Bach is like a privilege.”)
Because it’s hard to think of an ensemble with this unusual instrumentation, I asked Weiss which came first: the conceptually audacious music or the players he chose to bring it to life?
“I just picked the players that I wanted to play with that I thought would make a cool band, and then I wrote the music after I had the band assembled,” he said.
Cool band? More like a supergroup. So it seems Weiss is obsessive about understatement too, when he said, “It’s a fun hang and I thought that the instrumentation would be interesting, you know, would be something a little different. “I love all of the players a lot, immensely, and I like them all on a personal level. So a combination of those [things] made me it try it. Yeah, that’s how it went down.”
Dan Weiss Quartet featuring Peter Evans, Patricia Brennan, and Miles Okazaki, Thursday, June 12, 7 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave, Cleveland, Tickets $25, available here.
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
