Luke Stewar's Silt Trio: The Bottom

This is Jazz out of Washington DC, with Luke Stewart earning, along the way many plaudits for this work in this genre. He has worked with many different artists as well as solo, and is generally noted as one of the most influential names on the present Jazz scene.

For this album Stewart has this time round utilized the talents of Brian Settles on tenor sax and Chad Taylor on drums, to bring to life his ideas. This album contains 6 tracks that fall into the category of free form/improvisational Jazz. As someone not familiar with his previous work, I’ve delved into his back catalogue a little to get a flavour of the man and his work, to better inform this review.

This is 41 minutes of, at times very minimalist Jazz, with opener `Reminisce` featuring just sparse percussion and the sax only making an appearance late on, it rather strangely bought to (my) mind the work of Isao Tomita, the Japanese Avant-garde musician famed for his loose ambient works.

`Roots` is a smooth sax dominated track that along with some effective percussion work drives the piece on, and the 11 minute long `Angles` is in essence a sax solo punctuated with occasional percussion and bass, which did at times test my listening powers. The title track itself, for the first time brings Stewart`s tasteful bass work to the fore with its `walking` bass line taking centre stage, and the sax and percussion working around said instrument.

`Circles` is arguably the most free form number on display here and personally really didn’t do anything for me, with once again the sax taking over offering up at times a rather discordant atmosphere. The last track `Dream House` returns to a more structured nature and finishes off the album on a fairly high note.

There’s no doubting the talent on show but this is I believe an album for Jazz purists. I’ve dipped my proverbial musical toes into the Jazz world on occasion, and certainly wouldn’t class myself as any sort of expert in the genre, but in the main this is fairly tastefully done free form Jazz.

Track Listing
1. Reminisce
2. Roots
3. Angles
4. The Bottom
5. Circles
6. Dream House

Added: March 5th 2022
Reviewer: Malcolm Smith
Score:
Related Link: Artist Website
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Language: english

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