Expanding Light

Expanding Light is the debut offering by a new Whit Dickey Trio and only the second release on the drummer's Tao Forms label. This band features longtime associate Rob Brown on alto saxophone and youthful virtuoso Brandon Lopez on bass. It continues the re-emergence of the drummer as a leader after 2017's Vessel in Orbit and 2019's remarkable double outing from Tao Quartets. It also follows, by one week, the release of Morph, which comprises duo and trio sessions with Matthew Shipp and trumpeter Nate Wooley for ESP-Disk. Expanding Light is an album of deeply spiritual free jazz, free of excess or ego. Dickey called the Tao Quartets' Peace Planet/Box of Light the products of balanced Yin and Yang energy. He counters that Expanding Light is "going full-bore Yang." It's an engagement with "shunyata," or emptiness. Just as nothing in existence originates independently, emptiness is, actually, "everything," and therefore quite full. Expanding Light emerges from the interdependence of its participants: The resultant music from this trio connects to their individual lives and artistic practices, but also to collaboration as expression and the lineage of free jazz (and therefore jazz at large); it is extension, not summation. Opener "The Outer Edge" is introduced by Dickey's kick drum and cymbals before Brown offers an angular yet circular melody to which the drummer reacts by dancing around them, extrapolating rhythm from them as well as contributing. They improvise as a duo before Lopez enters and centers it with a walking bassline. Its sturdiness offers room for the other two before joining that very intuitive conversation with swirls of color. "Desert Flower" begins with Lopez exploring drones and open-tuned strings as Dickey offers accents with muted rim shots. The group interaction is refined, deeply emotional and spiritual. At 13-and-a-half minutes, the title track is the album's longest and its hinge piece. Its urgency emerges early, with Brown spiraling around a rhythm section engaged in active conversation. Tempos shift in both directions, and melodic ideas meet dissonant ones as Brown chases the ghost of mystery itself. He's content to embody it rather than expose its form. Dickey is among the most economical drummers out there. While he is always moving, he never engages in excess. Here he finds rhythm in the space between instruments, as revealed by his and Lopez's ebullient, yet graceful interaction in the middle, where they somehow solo and converse simultaneously. Brown re-enters with the blues, finding its resonance and truth comforting and exculpatory at the heart of the rhythmic engagement. Closer "The Opening" is introduced by Lopez's arco scree. Brown answers in kind, while Dickey utilizes all the drums and cymbals in his kit with a harmonic force that almost sings forth from the maelstrom while simultaneously contributing to it. Expanding Light is wildly creative; it is free jazz made with canny instincts, sensitivity, and a rare vulnerability from the collective. Expanding Light is proof of just how much there is left to discover in the well that is free jazz. ~ Thom Jurek