| The Vandermark 5’s first studio album in two years (and the first waxed with drummer Tim Daisy) further integrates and resolves the potent musical ideas & structural complexities that surfaced on their previous effort, 2001’s experimental Acoustic Machine.
Superbly saturated to 2” analog by Shellac’s Bob Weston (also at the helm on Spaceways Inc.’s recent Version Soul album), Airports For Light trades in a more palpable, effortless swing than past V5 efforts. Our favorite standard bearers’ mastery over their own post-modern ballads has dramatically increased as well, providing a more confident command of the “quieter” moments & myriad compositional challenges.
Airports for Light is not to be missed if you’re remotely interested in the future of jazz. It seems clear now that with every record, this remarkable quintet is forging a signature musical vocabulary... crafting a spectacular body of work mindful of the jazz canon’s towering antecedents, while enigmatically becoming theirs alone. |