Jazz requires close listening at the best of times, its tangents and digressions ever ready to leave the complacent ear flapping in the breeze.
But even those practised at leaning in will want to turn their head nearer still to Abey Sparks’ new album, Behold The Orb.
To the backing of what sounds like a woozy hand-turned organ, Sparks whispers the sedition of their project on the short opening track, the suggestion that the world needs "more strange evasions" and that we might find them in "the orb".
On later track orbital rim, Sparks is whispering again, by now seeing their own reflection in the orb as "the walls around me soften and the boundaries between my imagination and reality fade to a haze".
The action switches back and forth, the storytelling platforming further flights into Sparks’ luminous musical alternative. The orb rises as an antidote to the oppressively policed, hard-edged tesseract of our current reality.
On the phone from Wellington, home these past several years to the Dunedin-raised jazz musician, Sparks explains they’d been feeling particularly existential about the cosmic injustice abroad in the world, and how those injustices and the big rules that lie behind them overshadow the deep truths of our hearts.
"And I think the orb was about creating this grand vision of what the world could be, without appealing to existing authorities and hegemonies."
What the world needs is something more ethereal, cosmic and irrational, they say, an intervention of grandeur and transcendent truth to counter the status quo’s suffocating common sense.
It’s an ambitious vision, so the trick was always going to be in the communication. The long-limbed drummer was going to need help.
So, for the orb’s first outings — two gigs last year — Sparks assembled a quartet with capital city players Chris Beernink, bass, Mitch Dwyer, guitar, and Will Hanlon, sax.
"I was definitely thinking about the people behind the instruments when I chose the band. Each person lives a great creative life in their own right and they’re amazing people to work with," Sparks, who has just completed an honours year in jazz performance at the Wellington jazz school, says.
The four were soon in the recording studio, Wellington’s Tiny Triumph Recordings, in January this year.
"We had just a few rehearsals, and the ones closer to the recording date were, like, super long, and we got all the music together in a few really intense days — which I think parallels the effort towards the orb, the intensity of that.
"So, we recorded all the quartet stuff in one day, live in a room together, and then I did a lot of the overdub recording with extra saxophones, woodwinds and then all of the vocals I recorded throughout this year, DIY, on my laptop."
You could be forgiven for thinking Behold The Orb’s bright choral colourings carry the Aquarian influence of American band leader Kamasi Washington — that and the genre-jumping world building that goes on across the album.
But Sparks says the inspiration on this occasion lay elsewhere.
While acknowledging some of the sonic similarities to Washington’s work, Sparks says a couple of other influences were more front of mind — Maurice Ravel’s score for the ballet Daphnis et Chloe and the album It’s Time, by the great American jazz drummer Max Roach, which also employs a choir.
"I just hear something so otherworldly and magical about the choral sounds in the Ravel work," they say.
"And the Max Roach album, It’s Time, influenced me a lot, especially in the way the vocals were arranged in certain tracks as these accompanying moments with the jazz quartet."
In the event, Wellington vocalist Frida Flacks is a prominent presence in the mix.
"Once I had Frida on board, it elevated the music to new heights."
She instantly connected to the vision, capturing the emotional and transcendent in all the right places with vocal arrangements created on the fly, Sparks says.
As the album’s soundscapes expanded, the real world and intimate was mixing with the otherworldly and magical, they say.
"I think the worldly and otherworldly definitely coexist on the album and in the story. That connection between the sonic and the storytelling was really important and informed the production choices I made."
The relationship is established early on, as Sparks’ whispered opening gambit is immediately followed by the welcoming groove of the bossa nova, in struck by the prophecy.
Sparks says they draw from a musical vocabulary comprised of all the music they love, choosing between genres to best convey the emotions and moments of the story being told.
It’s not so much a conscious selection of genre, they say, as a conjuring of images, then providing a musical connection to those images.
"I think struck by the prophecy, for example, there’s a lot of anticipation and wonder and then there’s moments of awe as well, which kind of lead to transcendence. So, the first section with the Latin groove, the bossa nova, that would connect to this magical feeling of anticipation and then more heavy jazz swing elements would be moments of transcendence and effort towards the orb.
"I definitely like when music can transcend genre in that way. And I definitely think about bringing together those sonic influences without thinking about prescribed categories. And just trying to think freely."
The album
Behold The Orb, by Abey Sparks, is available as a download at Bandcamp.
