Austin Peralta - Endless Planets - 2 x Vinyl LPs

2024 release

Endless Planets is the final album by late Los Angeles-based pianist/composer Austin Peralta, son of skateboard pioneer Stacy Peralta and filmmaker Joni Caldwell. Upon original release, it was the label Brainfeeder's first foray into jazz. Peralta drew critical attention for his 2006 Sony debut, Maiden Voyage, a standards set recorded when he was 15 with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Billy Kilson. Less than a year later, he released Mantra, offering originals and standards with a quintet that included bassist Buster Williams and saxophonist Marcus Strickland. Nothing could have prepared most listeners for Endless Planets, an ambitious, self-composed suite that combines post-bop, Latin, modal, and vanguard jazz with subtle electronica. All but one tune was recorded in a single day, in California, while "Epilogue: Renaissance Bubbles" was cut in Brooklyn, New York. Peralta's sextet includes saxophonists Zane Musa (alto) and Ben Wendel (tenor), drummer Zach Harmon, bassist Hamilton Price, and electronicist Strangeloop. Peralta co-produced with Paul Pesco.

Opener "The Lotus Flower" is two minutes of pastoral impressionism as reverbed alto saxophone and piano dialogue around a four-note theme in waltz time. It segues into "Capricornus," a strident post-bop exercise. Both horn players converse atop Peralta's blocky, syncopated chord voicings as drums and bass drive the beat. Price delivers a short, punchy solo followed first by Peralta, then Wendel; later they trade fours with the pianist in a dramatic showdown and knotty outro. The intro to "The Underwater Mountain Odyssey" segues but quickly ratchets down into close, detailed conversation between bassist, pianist, and drummer, before Wendel and Musa take lengthy, very complementary solos. While the ballad "Ode to Love" connects lyric dots between Bill Evans' "Waltz for Debby" and John Coltrane's "Naima," the long closer "Algiers" weds an expressionist tone poem to post-bop before the piano's mantra-like modal pulse emerges and is joined by a circular bass vamp and hand percussion. At nearly five minutes, the repetitive riff frames Musa's alto solo, buoyed by flamenco-tinged piano chords before Wendel joins the fray. The pianist and sax players execute a quizzical, harmonically mysterious dialogue, underscored by ambient electronic washes and warm subdued tones during the long outro.

The 2024 vinyl reissue contains four bonus cuts from a BBC Maida Vale session in July 2011. Peralta led an all-British band with drummer Richard Spaven, bassist Tom Mason, alto saxophonist Jason Yarde, vocalist Heidi Vogel, and electronicist Jason Swinscoe of the Cinematic Orchestra. Vogel's performance on "DMT Song" (co-written by Peralta, its studio version appeared on Flying Lotus' Until the Quiet Comes) is a set highlight. So, too, is her singing on the unruly live version of the lush, languid, labyrinthine "The Garden" that closes the recording. All told, Endless Planets deserves a complete critical reappraisal in 2024. While overshadowed after Peralta's untimely, unexpected death in 2012, it now reveals itself as a post-bop masterwork.

Thom Jurek ~ AllMusicGuide