There are dream teams, and then there are Dream Teams. CODE Quartet is of the second kind. I’d only use capital letters if I didn’t fear sounding like a certain orange president. The crème de la crème of the crème de la crème: Lex French on trumpet, Christine Jensen on saxes, Adrian Vedady on double bass and Jim Doxas on drums. Each artist is at the top of his game and among the world’s elite on his or her instrument. And all of them are Montrealers. What a source of pride! CODE Red is the band’s second album, following on from Genealogy, which my colleague Alain Brunet praised (READ HIS REVIEW OF GENEALOGY HERE – in French).
Whereas Genealogy teased out the modernist, sometimes atonal, heritage of Ornette Coleman, CODE Red shifts the focus towards hard bop, or even post-bop, with its chromatic but well-planted harmonies. Assimilated by four encyclopaedic minds of jazz playing in all its facets, the learned traditions of Coltrane, Mingus, Shorter, Horace (Silver) and Miles coalesce here in a brilliant mastery of the art of improvised music, both historically informed and originally reinterpreted. Those who don’t know too much about it will love “the noise it makes” (to paraphrase the conductor Thomas Beecham when talking about classical music), while others who like to listen in depth will be in 7th heaven.
This is jazz of the highest order.
READ ALAIN BRUNET’S INTERVIEW WITH CODE QUARTET ON THE RELEASE OF THE ALBUM GENEALOGY IN 2021
