In the appropriately titled “Talk to Your Panda,” one of the eight songs available to us on the new album Mr. Bennett’s Mind from jazz collaborators The Daniel Bennett Group, melodies come slipping out of the darkness like shadows beneath the city lights, luring listeners into a haze of scattered harmonies that are dreamlike and lush (to put it quite mildly).
As tends to be the case with all of the tracks here, The Daniel Bennett Group put the tone of their instrumental prowess before any egomaniacal showboating, thus allowing their audience to enjoy the fruits of a complicated labor in jazz experimentation without our having to sift through any annoying filler.
There’s a wonderful conflict that develops between the sax parts and the piano in “The County Clerk” that instantly turns up the tension in the song before turning us over to a jittery ebbtide of percussion seemingly designed to extend the unsettling tone of the music without exploiting the discordant harmony any further. While wholly cerebral and a bit more complex than it needed to be (at least in my view), this kind of approach is perhaps what makes the music of Mr. Bennett’s Mind as provocative as it is; even without lyrics, The Daniel Bennett Group are finding a channel of communication in every track here.
The drums could have been just a bit louder in the mix than they ultimately are in “Variations on a Floating Theme,” but at the same time, I can understand what the band was trying to demonstrate in keeping them in the background for this tune. Unlike “Bending Bobby Brick” and “Jupiter,” “Variations on a Floating Theme” – and, to a lesser extent, “Three Studies on Emotion” – depend on melodic faceting to emphasize the swing of the rhythm almost exclusively, and have the percussive parts been given any more oomph, I suppose I can see where The Daniel Bennett Group might have run the risk of making the music feel a little too weighty in the grander scheme of things.
I would have started the tracklist off with “Bank Robbers” and “Talk to Your Panda” over “Turn Clockwise and Push,” but only to make the flow here just a bit more rigid than it is in this instance. Having a progressive fluidity makes it harder to put down Mr. Bennett’s Mind once it’s been picked up for the first time, but as a lifelong jazz fan, I can also appreciate the grandeur that a slightly jagged arrangement of material would have created for this LP.
It’s admittedly a little rougher around the edges in some spots than other independent jazz releases currently making headlines stateside are, but all in all, fans of the genre should be more than pleased with what The Daniel Bennett Group is submitting in this brand-new album. Mr. Bennett’s Mind doesn’t ask a whole lot out of us in exchange for a wealth of harmonic gems that aren’t all that commonly found on the Billboard charts anymore, and if you’re in the mood for some jubilant jazz play, its eight unique songs should provide you more than enough intrigue to last the summer season.
Mindy McCall