It's good to be yourself. Whoever that happens to be, it's worth taking stock of and appreciating the simple pleasure of being that person as a pivot point of perspective. That's my takeaway from the latest album Embrace Form, from San Francisco ensemble All Fused Up led by Joan Torre. The jazz group doesn't have a set playing style for the album. Embarking instead on a fusion approach of sorts, they cycle through varients and inspired motifs cribbed from familiar styles, but not in a way that is directly attributable to any singular tradition or source. Their sound percolates at both a distance and at the threshold of the senses. It emerges in much the same way that your experience of taking in the ambiance of a crowded restaurant or a cafe might- swashes of recognizable patterns (familiar choruses drifting down from the speakers overhead, the clinking of glasses, the rattle of silverware, bits and ends of conversation) catching your ear and announcing their presence in a moment before slipping back behind a curtain of anonymity the next. It's an environment of sensation that is easy to regard as both free-floating and grounding; particular and ubiquitous. Like an impressionist painting of a farmhand cutting wheat- the wind tousles the tall grain of the landscape at a distance, while the foreground stands inert, but when your focus shifts, the field becomes still, and it is the farmhand who is dancing to the music of the wind- a wholly integrated universe that is none-the-less defined by its separation of details. There is no center to Embrace Form, as it is all motion and trading embassies. It is not a technical album, but it still manages to be a demonstration of skill, drawing its potency from connection over complexity. A triumph of the momentum of the ordinary state of things in all its irreducible diversities. In this radical acceptance of the world, you will find yourself in the reflection of others, in the fog of relations and the light of recognition, in a total Embrace (of) Form.
