Tomin - A Willed and Conscious Balance

Tomin’s debut full-length work, A Willed and Conscious Balance, answers a set of questions left unasked in recent years, as a new generation of artists re-energizes the tradition often referred to as “jazz” into its own directions: Where are the composers working with large ensembles? Who are the arrangers creating unexpected charts and dreaming up new orchestral sounds, layered tones and harmonically vibrant colors, the kind that have amended jazz’s “music for soloists” reputation since the swing era’s sunset? Yes, if you pay enough attention, you know that big-bands still walk the Earth, and composers are writing compelling charts for them; but they’re all-too-rarely making music that sounds both new and inviting, now and classic.

Which is where the singular septet featured on Tomin’s A Willed and Conscious Balance comes in. It’s about the air they breathe into current ideas of creative music, the beautiful harmonies and textures this group of esteemed New York + Chicago players bring to life in Tomin Perea-Chamblee’s six originals — as well as in two pieces by fallen heroes, Booker Little and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre — all of which the 27 year-old composer, multi-instrumentalist and band-leader (re)imagined for the occasion. This is music that aspires towards humanist synergy, pulling forth a palette hard to come by nowadays, neither too difficult nor too abstract, yet one that still requires a healthy leap of sonic faith. In this, Tomin’s A Willed and Conscious Balance is, quite simply, unlike any new jazz album you’ll hear in 2024.

That’s partly because Tomin’s not your run-of-the-mill New York musician. The many wind-/brass-/reed-playing, born-and-bred Brooklynite has an exceptional local pedigree — time spent as trombonist in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra, alumnus of the punk-hip-hop-jazz Standing on the Corner, with co-signs by (and appearances alongside) a slew of jazz-adjacent post-genre mavericks. Yet even as Tomin quietly negotiates Brooklyn’s DIY music community, his day-job as a bioinformatician, working with science data and research, distinguishes his relationship to the sound, and his role within it. The string of homemade Bandcamp-only EPs he recorded in 2020-21 (and gathered on this summer’s compilation, Flores para Verene/Cantos para Caramina), was filled with bedroom recordings of beatless miniatures, poetic jazz covers made from layered horns, and originals formed out of solo synths. Already, Tomin’s deep care for outre jazz traditions, a rare approach to blending instruments, and the desire to create sonic spaces owing as much to modern processes and technology as to history, was on full display.

Tomin’s discerning, emotionally weighty perspective is among his artistic superpowers, and it’s a primary reason A Willed and Conscious Balance is played by an all-star team of collaborators gathered from throughout his life. Trumpeter Linton Smith II and cellist #1 Clérida Eltimé are long-time compadres — Tomin describes the former as a “brother/mentor” and the latter as “section leader” with “sister vibes.” Bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes are the rhythm section in Irreversible Entanglements, and alongside Lester St. Louis, cellist #2 here and a key member of jaimie branch’s Fly or Die, all central figures of that Brooklyn community. Tomin first played with Chicago-based keyboardist Teiana Davis (who also records as Anaiet Soul) at a July 2021 show, “Angel Bat Dawid + jaimie branch and Friends.” That show is also where he first met Lester, Luke and Tcheser, making the spiritual influence those two great female bandleaders hold over the proceedings hard to deny. (Particularly branch, to whom Tomin co-dedicates a poem in the album’s sleeve notes.)

Yet as good as the band is, it’s the remarkable way these musicians attack these pieces — how the sound in Tomin’s head blossoms in their mutual hands — that makes A Willed and Conscious Balance a triumph. Each plays on and off the page, less engaged in soloing than in the interaction of the collective, the building of a band sound and how that informs the building of society, is the album’s foundational point. Much of the music was recorded live, but it’s also strewn with minor overdubs, not for highlighting individual instrumental lines, but to create thicker harmonic layers that both carry the listener and create tension. (Not for nothing that Tomin invokes Charles Mingus as his arranging hero.) It’s a worldly Balance where trombones are stacked, cellos are split, multiple clarinets begin to resemble synths, and even the composer who imagined it gets blissfully lost in the music when trying to identify all the elements.