Jon Irabagon’s membership in Mostly Other People Do the Killing should testify to the saxophonist’s unpredictability and considerable flexibility of style, but it may not quite cover all that he was up to in 2009. It was the year he made his most conservative CD, The Observer, for Concord, part of his reward for winning the 2008 Thelonious Monk Saxophone Competition. It was a solid mainstream modern session with Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid and Victor Lewis providing allstar support.

A few months later in Lisbon, Irabagon went into a recording studio with bassist Hernâni Faustino and drummer Gabriel Ferrandini and recorded Absolute Zero, an hour-long set of seven pieces, each attributed to the three musicians and accordingly sounding like free improvisation. It’s likely Irabagon’s most demanding set to date, even when one considers the 78-minute tenor extravaganza Foxy.

Irabagon sticks to his alto here and plays within a very specific lineage of the instrument in free jazz: the corrosive. It’s the one that begins with Jackie McLean (most specifically of Let Freedom Ring vintage, where the slightly-out-of-tune hard-edged McLean sound is complemented by the upper register squeal); continues with Giuseppi Logan and early Charles Tyler; is complemented by the Sun Ra alto saxophonists Danny Davis and Marshall Allen; then jumps ahead to a recent pinnacle with Jean-Luc Guionnet on recordings like Bird Dies. Irabagon’s notes are often yips and cries and they’re always bending away from anything that might suggest concert pitch. The melodies he constructs are often just a few notes, microscopic, fragmentary phrases that are repeated and contorted, bending out of shape in the same gesture that repeats them, sometimes with circular breathing to keep the process of disintegration continuing further.

The trio couldn’t be better matched. Faustino and Ferrandini are capable of an infernal power, since evidenced by their work in RED trio and great invention, apparent particularly in RED trio collaborations with John Butcher and Nate Wooley. From the opening phrases of “States of Matter”, with Faustino bowing a complementary circular pattern, the entire movement of the music appears to be going backwards, as if it must insist from the outset that its movement will be eccentric or will not be at all. That sense of insistence may change direction, but it’s always apparent in one form or another, even when things slow down to what might be called a ballad tempo. By the end of it all on “Spacetime”, Irabagon’s elemental trills and triplet rhythms are still etching themselves indelibly, the trio delineating a terrain that is at once oddly toxic and strangely refreshing.
Stuart Broomer

Jon Irabagon - alto saxophone
Hernani Faustino - double bass
Gabriel Ferrandini - drums

All compositions by Irabagon/Faustino/Ferrandini

Recording by Joaquim Monte at Namouche Studio, Lisbon 19th October 2009
Layout by Marek Wajda
Cover photos by Vera Marmelo and Bryan Murray