Jerry Leake's Cubist, Review by John Garelick

http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/100922-pardon-the-interruption/?page=1#TOPCONTENT

Percussionist Jerry Leake calls it Cubist — which also is the name of his new album (on his own Rhombus Publishing label), and which he celebrates at Ryles this Friday. These concepts take in the continuum of the jazz and ethnic-folklore traditions — not just sequential chronology, but also simultaneity: all traditions existing at once, side by side and on top of one another. To that, Leake would also add the varied perspectives of mathematics involved in his encyclopedic knowledge of world rhythms, and the density one associates with Cubist visual art. The album’s subtitle is Shapes of Sound and Time.

That may all sound daunting, but Cubism is, above all, an album of body-moving grooves. Long a valued sideman in town, Leake is best known for his collaborations with Moroccan-dub jammers Club d’Elf and Indo-Afro-jazz fusionists Natraj. He pinpoints Cubism as being halfway between the loose, trippy jams of the former and the tightly composed formalism of the latter.

With its orchestral scope, crystalline transparency, and melodic focus, Cubism sounds like a band, but most tracks are no more than two or three people: Leake playing layers and layers of varied percussion, he and his wife, Lisa, overdubbing vocals, and Randy Roos — who was also Leake’s production partner — playing a small arsenal of guitars.

As Leake describes it, he made repeated trips to Roos’s home studio on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, loading up whatever percussion he’d need for a particular set of tracks — Indian tablas, African balafon, Indonesian gamelan — and adding a new layer with each visit. In many cases, he would mix the flavors of different traditions. “Na Yella Bo” matches a 12/8 African Dagomba rhythm with a 12-beat alegría flamenco cycle; it’s played with, among other things, gung-gong bass drum, cajón, and handclaps. On “Geo,” he shares credit with one of his mentors, the MIT Indian-music scholar George Ruckert, using one of Ruckert’s ginti rhythmic patterns but bringing in turntablist (and fellow Club d’Elfer) Mister Rourke rather than tablas. Leake also asked fellow New England Conservatory faculty member Ken Schaphorst to orchestrate the jazziest of the tunes here, “Smile.”

One of the players from “Smile,” revered reed-and-flute man Stan Strickland, will be part of the Ryles Cubist line-up, which will also include the Leakes, Roos, keyboardist Steve Hunt, bassist Brad Barrett, and drummer Marty Wirt, with another guest from the album, Noam Sender, on ney and vocals.