Hank Williams Project

Album Review

The melding of creative jazz and Americana is not new, guitarist Bill Frisell being perhaps the most well-known recent explorer of the territory where the freedom of jazz meets the expansiveness of the American rural plains and mountains. Frisell's path is well-trodden and highly popular among jazz listeners both avant and mainstream, although at least occasionally his countrified music seems best suited to a back-porch snooze. One might even conclude at times that Americana jazz has reached a stylistic dead end on a two-track rutted path behind a broken-down barn somewhere in Kansas; although as of the mid-2000s Frisell has shown signs of becoming reenergized, his music doesn't seem designed to jolt you awake until he decides to venture pretty dang far from the Americana realm. Perhaps it's best to look elsewhere for truly caffeinated Americana jazz, and Andrew Bishop's Hank Williams Project is a good place to start. For this disc, tenor saxophonist/clarinetist Bishop has assembled a truly eclectic bunch of players ranging from New York City drummer Gerald Cleaver (seemingly everywhere in the creative improvisation world these days) to North Carolinian banjoist, composer, and music professor Paul Elwood; Jupiter Coyote fiddler Steve Trismen; and a host of top musicians from the bandleader's hometown of Ann Arbor, MI. Towering over everyone, however, is the project's country music icon namesake Hank himself, whose spirit imbues the music regardless of how far it wanders from the dusty back roads of the American heartland. And wander far it does — even, believe it or not, to the raga universe of the Indian subcontinent.

Bookended by two versions of Bishop's elegiac "Hymn for Hank Williams" and including some Williams classics like a slow and jazz-bluesy "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and stop-start "Your Cheatin' Heart" arranged by vocalist/soprano saxophonist Andy Kirshner, the CD notably includes three Elwood compositions that are something altogether different. "Again You Win" is close to jazz-rock, with Cleaver and bassist Tim Flood laying down an insistent groove and Trismen, Bishop, and guitarist Ryan Mackstaller bending and twisting notes around each other as Elwood cooks away with hot banjo pickin' through the middle of the arrangement. With a fiery Bishop tenor solo and some nearly metal power chords from Mackstaller, what kind of mutant music is this, exactly? On Elwood's "Found a New Love" a strange hybrid of bluegrass and harmonically skewed post-bop melds into Brötzmann-esque free jazz as everyone in the band aside from Bishop, Cleaver, and Flood eventually drops away and the listener is confronted by one of the hottest tenor sax/drums/bass trios ever to knock the ceiling off Brooklyn's Barbès or Ann Arbor's Firefly Club. And then there is "All Is Bliss," again penned by Elwood — it's rolling, floating raga-jazz with a tamboura-styled drone beneath Kirshner's vocal glissandos sung in unison with the strings. By the time Katri Ervamaa's lovely cello ushers in Bishop's "Hymn for Hank Williams (Farewell)" to close out the disc with a tear and a gentle wave goodbye, you have to marvel at the long and circuitous road this music has taken to come full circle back to the beginning again. And somehow it all hangs together, even as you've shaken prairie dust out of your boots along a trek through the foothills of the Himalayas. Who would've thought Hank Williams' shadow was quite that big? Andrew Bishop knew it, and here's a recording that will prove it to you, too, while reinvigorating the very idea of Americana jazz in the process.