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.
This sound in Tomin’s head required the right symmetry of compositions, so he did what great writers and arrangers have done through the years: make up something new, but also borrow from himself and from those he’s long admired. There are two pieces written specifically for Balance — “movement” had this band’s players in mind, an interlocking bass-cello-drums groove, with Tomin’s flute and Linton’s trumpet floating above; while “Untitled Dirge” is a gorgeous large-scale funeral march with solos from Luke and, especially, Lester’s mournful cello, a heavy emotional piece. Three tracks reimagine Tomin compositions that appeared previously in bedroom versions: “Love” has gone from a solo keyboard model to a slowly unfolding epic, rooted in a cello–keys drone, and feels like the most “spiritual jazz” track here. “Life” is now a dance-tune, driven by Teiana’s Wurlitzer and Tcheser’s funky drums, and features a wonderful counterpoint in Clérida’s cello solo. And “Life Revisited,” originally written as an inversion of “Life,” is a many-layered beast (Tomin describes it as “sisyphean to me”), gloriously but simply heaping reeds and horns on top of each other. Considered together, alongside Tomin’s solo-constructed interludes, they are a portrait of a young composer and music-thinker of immense pathos and ingenuity, ears and heart pointed out towards the universe.
The album ends with two exquisite covers that Tomin credits with “huge compositional impact on me.” Released in 1961, trumpeter Booker Little’s “Man of Words” was written as a conceptual piece (ostensibly about writer/producer Nat Hentoff, but also manifested Little’s desire to find a new balance between composing and free-playing); it features his trumpet in front of a drumless group that included Julian Priester’s trombone and Eric Dolphy’s clarinets, and it’s easy to hear its colors and ideas influencing Tomin. Except that here, Linton’s gorgeously expressive horn now rises and sweeps ahead of a big group-sound, with Teiana’s Rhodes and Tomin’s alto clarinet peeking out of the forest, Little’s concept writ large. The closing, full-band version of Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre’s reverential “Humility in the Light of the Creator” brings Tomin’s journey full-circle. When Tomin was younger, discovering this 1969 piece by the Chicago saxophonist was a further gateway into work by the AACM family, and, though he does not consider himself religious, spoke to, in his own words, “the powers beyond us/the life we’re fortunate to live.” A solo version, released in 2021, found Tomin rebuilding “Humility” out of clarinets. And here too he harmonizes on it, playing the melody by simultaneously stacking alto + bass clarinets and the flute, before a baroque wall of sound, the strings underpinning and shadowing him. The aura, from its original title through the septet’s beautiful performance, is of Coltrane and Pharoah and that moment in musical time so revered these past few years. Not mimicked or recreated, so much as imagined anew.
New and yet old. Upon hearing parts of the whole album’s early mix, a high-school bandmate of Tomin’s who remains a confidante, said that it sounded a lot like the music he talked about making even back then. Its individual sounds, its humanist ideals, its shared accessibility and difficulty, its sense of group rather than of a star soloist. If the tradition often referred to as “jazz” continues to move forward — and it always will, whether all of us get to hear it on recordings or not — this is part of the balance required of its continued travels. Willed and conscious.
- Piotr Orlov
