Joe Westerlund - Curiosities From The Shift [LP]

During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? The result is aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with friends decorating this space alongside him.

The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities’ first half begins with the junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame “Tem” and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and shakers on “Can Tangle.” There is a hard-won joy to these numbers, as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead end but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became a kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores across Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener “Nu Male Uno” to the uncanny amorphousness of closer “Felt Like Floating.” All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm, like the loping strut at the center of “Midpoint” and the head-nodding pulse that winds through “Persurverance,” winkingly misspelled to suit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are springboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New Age references—shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring flutes—that circle through “Midpoint” or the dub-indebted delays and gamelan hymns that bubble up through “Persurverance.” This is deeply multivalent music, each number’s propulsive core counterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness and joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here, tangling toward infinity.

In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund reached out to friends—Califone’s Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.

Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album’s insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, this is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.