James Singleton has produced something very special with his album Malabar. The upright bassist from New Orleans has assembled a sextet that is able to swing like they are playing on a Charles Mingus record while dredging up a rusty, swamp-logged and twisted sense of American and the blues. Malabar is a very strange and wonderful record, mainly because of how moody it is. During some of the sinking, stinking, cracked and clever intervals on this record, I half expect Tom Waits to emerge from behind a curtain, walk to center stage, sit on a tarnished wooden stool under a flaxen spotlight, and read to me some of his cryptic poetry. It's not a bad-sounding record, in fact, the production is spotless, but it is "bad" in terms of its attitude- something that it has in abundance. Its inspirations are all too human, and down to earth as an earthworm's tunnel. Its perspective is downright subterranean. So dark the light of the moon can barely escape its surface. A sea of dark nights in a solitary city, bathed in tears and dirty rain falling through plumbs of smog, illuminated by the winking ambivalent angels of inadequately looked after street lights. You're thirsty. There's an unsettling feeling, a rumbling somewhere below your heart and in the hollow of your chest. It might be the vibration of a passing L train, or it might be something existential that is causing your insides to jostle and wander. Whatever it is, you need something to put in your stomach to douse the fire and quiet those nerves. A calamity of colliding rhythms greets you as you enter a lonely, lo-light, basement tavern and feel your spirit intersect with the sounds flowing out of the jazz band in the corner. You take a seat on a ripped leather cushion and try to keep to yourself- even then the sounds of fingers against taught bass strings, the hot breath heaving out of a saxophone, and a bevy of antagonistic drum patterns draws you out of your hermitage, even just so much as to remind you that you're not alone in the room- that there is a world behind the isolation of your own thick skull. Malabar enters through the unknown cracks in the armor carelessly put on each day. It lifts up and gets under the defenses that divide the real from the knowing of the real. It is an impressive sculpture of concrete feeling in that way- super real to the point of caricature, and therefore genuine enough to avoid contrivance. It is an album that manages to grab and hold abstract themes, all while maintaining a firm footing in the firmament and drama of the uncannily familiar. It has the wild, emancipated spirit of a Rob Mazurek session and the courageous but ugliness charisma of a Faith No More set. Hideous beautiful and naively artful, James has the knack for the kind of jazz that makes people who don't listen to Jazz wonder what else they've been missing. Now they don't have to wonder. Malabar will tell you everything you need to know in a way they can't ignore.
