Christopher Dammann: Dead Words
Shifting Paradigm Records
Chicago-based double bassist Christopher Dammann follows his 2025 sextet recording on Out Of Your Head Records with a slightly leaner quintet release featuring pianist Jim Baker, trumpeter James Davis, saxophonist Jon Irabagon, and drummer Mike Reed. As strong as the earlier release is, the quintet format might be the one best suited to Dammann in offering added mobility and flexibility. Further to that, these particular players align fluidly with his sensibility when each possesses a clear identity, mature voice, and is fluent in the tradition but not creatively constrained by it. As if purposefully illustrating the point, the recording's five pieces extend from a bebop-fueled workout and contemporary jazz expression to freewheeling improvs. The press release gets it right in describing the bassist's voice as “historically grounded, deeply swinging, and committed to exploration without nostalgia.”
The manner by which he works with tradition is inspired. Rather than simply covering a bebop tune, Dammann treats it as a “spiritual contrafact” whereby the original template's present but alluded to in the update. In place of museum pieces broached reverentially, his originals grant maximum freedom to him and his partners, even if ties to earlier tunes might be in their DNA. Dammann also applies the contrafact concept in a more abstract sense when he uses an earlier artist's conceptual approach as a blueprint.
Cueing the listener, Sunny Murray, Cecil Taylor, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and James Brandon Lewis are cited as RIYL reference points; conspicuous by their absence, however, are Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus, both of who come to mind as the opening track plays. With a title inspired by a beaver family Dammann saw determinedly inhabiting Chicago's Montrose Harbor, “Montrose B” plays like a Mingus quintet covering a Parker bop classic. Swinging hard from the outset, the performance grows breezier still when the front-liners voice the theme in unison before splintering contrapuntally. Up first with an acrobatic statement is Irabagon, after which Baker and Davis deliver solos by turns suave and fiery.
Drawing for inspiration from Sunny Murray's penchant for maintaining pulse without fixed meter, “Untitled” follows, the five collectively blazing and electronics adding to the wildness. Darting stabs from Irabagon and Davis suggest alien cross-talk, while Reed and Dammann emote with total freedom. Wielding bow, the bassist animates the strutting groove of “White Gladis” before handing off to Baker for a smooth, chords-embellished turn and declamatory, toreador-like exchanges between Irabagon and Davis. Bill Dixon's concept of elastic time's the inspiration behind “Two Themes For Improvisation,” which plunges forcefully into a dense thicket of eruptive free-flow. Unfolding with urgency, the muscular concluding statement “This is an Unraveling” could pass for a Mingus composition when the arrangement sees individual and ensemble parts entwine fluidly and the writing's infused with dramatic portent.
Irabagon, who's credited with stritch, a straight-bodied Buescher alto sax, is his usual on-fire self, as is Davis, who sneaks in some spacey electronic squiggles when not blowing heat through his horn. The others impose themselves as memorably on the performances while also ensuring the foundation's tight and secure. At thirty-five minutes, Dead Words is a short release by CD standards yet feels complete when this compact statement checks all of its intended boxes. Interestingly too, the performances play so convincingly like live club takes (the release was recorded at Chicago's Electrical Audio in June 2025), it's almost disconcerting when audience applause doesn't appear after a track ends.August 2026