Jason Palmer Live in Brooklyn
The fiery trumpeter fronts a top-notch quartet in an intimate room
Jason Palmer isn’t as well-known as he should be, perhaps because he’s lived and taught in Boston for the last 20 years or so, whereas jazz, to the extent it’s promoted at all, tends to be New York-centric. He’s a trumpeter at once fiery and smooth-toned, dexterous and contemplative, equally emotive and virtuosic with chromatic flurries and balladic whole notes.
He's in high demand when he’s not teaching at Berklee and the New England Conservatory, having performed with Herbie Hancock, Roy Hargrove, Lee Konitz, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, among others—appearing on 40 albums as a sideman, more than a dozen as a leader.
His latest album, The Cross Over: Live in Brooklyn, has him fronting a Class A quartet that would be not only welcomed but begged for at any jazz venue—Mark Turner on tenor sax, Larry Grenadier on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums. Yet this album was recorded live at Ornithology, a tiny club, which resembles a living room with a bar, in the remote Bushwick district of Brooklyn. This is a good thing, it turns out: you can hear, practically feel, the intimate interplay not only among the musicians but between them and the closely enthusiastic audience.
Like Palmer’s last few albums, The Cross Over was produced by Giant Step Arts, a small nonprofit label run by Jimmy Katz, best known as a jazz portrait photographer but he’s also a superb engineer. All of his label’s albums are recorded before live audiences, most of the recent ones at Ornithology, and Katz has figured out where to place the microphones for maximum palpability.
It doesn’t hurt that he uses vintage microphones—Schoeps, Neumanns, and AEAs—with minimal manipulation of any sort. The Cross Over consists of 2 CDs: the first, an hour long, capturing a complete live set laid down on August 5, 2023; the second, about 70 minutes, documenting a set the following night. Some of the tracks are a little long; a couple of them could probably have been left off with little damage done; but the fact that we’re hearing the whole show. as if we’re sitting there with the audience, the players just a few feet away, enlivens the experience.
If heard casually in the background, the music might seem a bit formulaic, the post-bop equivalent of Irish reels, with lots of scale-runs and sixteenth notes. But listen more closely, and you’ll hear a lot going on (as is the case with reels when played live by virtuosic musicians). Palmer’s solos take jolting twists and turns without losing their melodic drive. The two-horn harmonies with Turner (who, by the way, cuts loose as freely as I’ve ever heard him on his own bigger-label albums) stir a bracing mix of sweet and tannic. Grenadier shifts seamlessly from keeping time to plucking countermelodies to taking the lead. Gilmore anchors the rhythm, pushing it forward, pulling it back.
All the instruments sound right-there, surrounded by air. Palmer is a trumpeter, and Giant Step Arts is a label, worth watching out for. Available for purchase on Bandcamp.com as double CD set or streamed.
