Storytime
Fabrice Fuentes, PinKushion.com View Original French Review
Aaron Gervais, French to English Translation
A few weeks out from the never-ending deliberations that mark our year end, multi-instrumentalist (soprano sax, oboe, english horn) and composer Rob Mosher can pretty much lay claim to the title of Best New Jazz Artist of the Year, for whatever it's worth. His group Storytime is made up of nine musicians at the top of their game (six brass players, a guitarist, a bass player, and a drummer/percussionist), and they create a kind of music that is certainly jazz but that also pays tribute to the classical tradition. Mosher grabs this genre-bending bull by the horns with joyful audacity, following in the footsteps of Gil Evans and Wayne Shorter, while also nodding in the direction of Kurt Weil, J.S. Bach and Claude Debussy.
This young, 28-year-old Canadian, currently living in New York, describes his music as a diverse collection of simple melodies supported by sophisticated musical structures. That's exactly what he gives us—and with complete naturalness and an ever-growing undercurrent of mischievousness. Tracks like "What Snowflakes Are Plotting", "The Tall Tales of Todd Toven" and "1920's Car Chase" are presented almost like entertaining intermezzos designed to bridge the more elaborate musical shores of the other works on the album. In this way, Mosher avoids the pitfalls of many other efforts of this type; those stiff, self-conscious projects that try too hard and end up flirting with boredom and academicism. The sonic panorama of The Tortoise oscillates between tonal improvisation and elaborately thought-out compositions, all without losing a narrative thread that is rich and vivacious, ebbing and flowing like breath even as the listeners hold their breaths in anticipation.
The Tortoise is notable for its successful application of the science of pointillistic arranging and is extremely impressive as a first release in this genre (it's also worth nothing that saxophonist Rob Mosher's musicality is equally evolved in the Rob Mosher Quartet and as a singer-songwriter, projects that he has developed in parallel to Storytime). From the expressive joyfulness of the brass in unison or in counterpoint, to intimate and isolated dialogues that are intertwined with ampler, fleshed-out choruses, Mosher's orchestral writing overflows with inventive details and striking colours that bear witness to a fertile imagination that is constantly renewing and reinventing itself. An album without notable shortcomings that is at the very least promising.
