Blue Lake - The Parrot

If, like for us, the discovery of Jason Dungan's Blue Lake project this year has been nothing short of a revelation, you'll be pleased to learn there's a deeper history that extends beyond the most recent Stikling LP. 2019 appears to be when it all began with the release of The Parrot album, a half solo, half collaborative eleven-song set of folk-orientated improv. Built from a tableaux of guitars, various wind instruments, and scattered percussion, Dungan has arranged a set of instrumentals that flirts with free music impulse but feels tied together by a kind of surrealist melodicism - tonally, it is mostly pretty and delicate, structurally, by way of contrast, free-roaming and abstract. It's a transportative collection, almost verging on magical realism at times in the way it arranges familiar tones and textures into unknown shapes, ala Sam Gendel's jazz-not-jazz approach. Following a few years later, the Reading, Sleeping cassette finds Dungan alone and working with the zither that featured so prominently on Stikling, and probably represents a key seachange in his compositional approach. Though still deeply explorative, these three pieces have less connection with free jazz abstraction, instead following the emotional impressionism afforded by the zither and the clarinet's warmth. It's through that clarinet that I hear some connection Tara Clerkin Trio, even if they are unmoored by a vocal line. Dungan has a great instinct for structural ingenuity, but he's best at creating rich and evocative dioramas that are at once both unique and comforting. A grade pieces, both. And of course, sold out at source.