When you dream that a musician will escort you to unfamiliar environs, sometimes the guide just has to be a percussionist or a drummer. The path could lead from Dizzy Gillespie & Chano Pozo's "Manteca" (1947) to Chico Hamilton's "Gongs East" (1959) to Max Roach's "Percussion Bitter Sweet" (1961) to the Tony Williams Lifetime's "Emergency!" (1969) to Ronald Shannon Jackson's "Decode Yourself" (1985) to Trilok Gurtu's "Living Magic" (1991) to Adam Rudolph's "Go: Organic Orchestra 1" (2002) to Christopher Garcia's "Resonancia" (2020) to Kraig Grady's "Lake Aloe Festival" (2021). Or wherever.
This time the trip comes courtesy of Randy Gloss, a long-practiced SoCal slapper and striker of many world instruments, sometimes electronified. In Vol. II of his "The Ayes Have It" series, he focuses more tightly on composition, so we soak up not only the sensuality, flow and expertise of his sounds (which would be enough), but a greater sense of resolution.
Take the opener, "The Ninth Anything," which starts as a processional overture and moves through cooking tabla, a bellydance tar bridge, psychedelic rain and dublike echo -- like, yikes! "Led by the Hand," too, is a multipart excursion highlighted by weird twangs on the mysterious electronic aFrame instrument and a traps groove attributed to Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks"; you're gonna need your subwoofer for this one, and for the enormous kick and ear-tingling cymbals of "Estuaries."
The treats keep on comin' with Whitmanesque variety, such as the vibraphone over heavy Afro drums on the Latinate "Super Obrigado," and the electro noise, gamelan clock of doom, and hand drums poking like a carrion bird on "Shadowlight Soundtrack," all arranged just so. But musicians, oh those musicians, will come back for the rhythmic sophistication, as on "Solo for Three Congas," where Gloss circulates a bunch of time signatures and magically resolves them, or "A Folk Drum Solo," where he seems to use a drum, handclaps and a triangle to suspend time entirely -- these are things great jazz ensembles sometimes do, and Gloss is doing them alone.
More important, Gloss is doing all this entertainingly. MetalJazz first listened to "Ayes II" on the same night as "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," "Sketches of Spain" and Lee Perry's "Rainford." Perfect.
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Sample/buy here. Reviewed on vinyl, the format Mr. Gloss prefers.
Randy Gloss & Carlos Niño play the World Stage on Fri. Nov. 4, streamable here on that night at 8pm and here thereafter. Please donate.