Ben Wolfe's Understated Swing

The vital bass-composer carves out another unlikely gem

Bassist-composer Ben Wolfe is one of those “musicians’ musicians,” little known even among aficionados but a staple on the New York scene, adept at jazz and classical, rarely straying from the straight-ahead, but carving melodic lines and harmonic colors well outside conventional boundaries.

 His latest album, his 11th as a leader, is called The Understated (on his own Resident Arts Records label), and that’s one fair description of the music. Of its 10 tracks, all composed by Wolfe, eight are ballads, and gently phrased ones at that, but there’s quiet adventure here, rewards to careful listening. It’s mainly a quartet album (piano, bass, tenor sax, and drums), two tracks augmented by guitar. The musicians are all top notch. Nicole Glover loops the melodic lines with a grace at once casual and intense, like a master calligrapher or figure skater; her tone puts me in mind of how Lee Konitz might have sounded, had he played tenor sax instead of alto. Aaron Kimmel shimmers all over the trap set, mainly with brushes, alternately anchoring, accenting, and spreading the rhythm. Orrin Evans swirls colors at the piano (spelled on two tracks by Sullivan Fortner, who paints chords with a wider-ranged palette and more syncopated cadences). Wolfe pulls all the streams together, though subtly; he doesn’t overtly play the leader, except when he carves out a solo. (the late Russell Malone strums guitar on two tracks, though mainly for texture.)

I’m a bit more partial to Wolfe’s album from last year, Unjust, which featured a septet (the same band plus alto sax, trumpet, and vibes) playing a wider range of music. Yet the music on The Understated is no less ambitious. Its narrower range poses a challenge, yet somehow this music swings, in a gently insistent way; no way is it “chamber jazz.”

I don’t think the effect would come off if the album weren’t well recorded—if the bass plucks didn’t resonate with wood, if the trap set’s cymbals didn’t sizzle, if the sax didn’t breathe, or if the harmonic overtones didn’t bloom, if the music’s myriad vital subtleties were truncated.

Luckily, the album is superbly recorded. Todd Whitelock, who also engineered Aaron Diehl’s splendid Zodiac Suite and the last few wondrous albums by Cécile McLorin Salvant, was at the controls. Chris Muth mastered, as he has for those albums as well as many others, including several of Acoustic Sounds’ jazz reissues. Whitelock laid down the tracks at PowerStation Studio C, which he considers (as he said in an email to me) “perfect for jazz, very immediate (live sounding) but not so live that it has a lot of reflections when drums and horns play dynamically.” This quality enabled all the musicians to play, as Wolfe desired, in the same room—no isolation booths, no headphones—requiring them to listen and set their own natural balance. Whitelock picked up their sounds with vintage Neumann mics, plugged into a circa-1990 Neve VRP analog console and an AVID Matrix A-to-D converter, which he says “vastly improves” the sound of ProTools. The results are on the warm sound of neutral (which is where I like it for this type of music) but still very present and lively.