Recently, while broadcasting on Community Radio, I chose to play a track from an album unknown to me, based purely on its title, “Future Primitive”. Whilst I generally don’t make it a habit to use such arbitrary methodology to sequence radio shows, the title was the same as the most awesome skate video from back in the day, Powell Peralta’s 1985 effort. This and other “Bones Brigade” videos launched a million ollies and were responsible, in part, for wearing out a few thousand pairs of Converse Chuck Taylors. So, it was with some surprise after a touch of Internet trawling, that twenty-year-old piano prodigy Austin Peralta is the son of Stacey, who put the Peralta in Powell, so to speak. Austin doesn’t need to trade on the family connections to come correct. Whereas his father rolled the boulevards of Venice Beach, cess sliding into the sunset, young Austin has obviously spent countless hours at the piano, honing an astounding set of musical talents to a razor sharp edge that is totally complimented by the astute players accompanying his silky fingers on Endless Planets.
Forget that this album is on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label – after reading the press release that accompanied the album, I was left thinking that this was some new and exotic intertwining of jazz and wonky electronic production. Endless Planets has a few short interludes and passages in the fleshed out songs that hint at the LA dayglo hiphop aesthetic, but make no mistake, this is a JAZZ album through and through. Maybe your familiar with one of the 90s most dominant musical paradigms – that of the DJ or electronic producer forsaking the cheap thrills and nasty effects of early productions for a new found “maturity” and a rediscovered passion for Lonnie Liston Smith or Chick Corea. In most cases the resulting music was shorn of all passion and, excuse the pun, verve, and what was left was a bland cocktail jazz lite that found most success on egregious chill out compilations. Passages from Endless Planets haven’t stuck maddeningly in my synapses whilst formulating this review, and some passages teeter on the edge of bland – yet, its the sort of album that is a pure delight to listen to in a receptive mood, but it could just sort-of slide by in the never-ending procession of sounds bombarding the stereo.
Endless Planets only hints at what Austin Peralta could be capable of on future outings. I note that this is his third album, and the first completely composed of his own music. The previous album’s covers are quite a telling list of where Endless Planets is positioned in the jazz firmament; Coltrane, Hancock, Corea & Mingus. There are hints of the misty Scandinavian jazz of the ECM label on album opener “Introduction: The Lotus Flower”. I can imagine Jan Garbarek and Keith Jarrett getting together in LA for a few hours in the sun. The following three songs dive straight into a heaving, driving, and sometimes contemplative form of Jazz. From the trad yet compelling Mingus and Shepp textures of “Capricornus”, “The Underwater Mountain Odyssey” flows straight on Peralta’s playing astounding, yet he manages to not come across as overly showy, allowing the horns, drums and bass room to bump and shuffle. “Ode to Love” mellows things out and adds subtle electronics, but remains relatively straight ahead in texture. “Algiers” invokes the cosmic / eastern jazz of Pharoah Sanders circa Izipho Zam and Mingus’ “Ysabel’s Table Dance.” Peralta beats out a rhythm using one truncated and deadened note before dancing across the keyboard and back again. Numerous times the central motif is reasserted, whilst the bass hypnotically pulses and the horns squawk in a suitable eastern mode. As the end approaches, we fall over the edge into an aquatic echo chamber of static and subtle memory. There’s plenty of subtle memories present throughout Endless Planets, the palimpsest of past jazz-men and the promise of the future. Similar to, yet removed from, his father’s youthful exuberance circa “Skate and Destroy”, Endless Planets is an ode to joy of creation.
Oliver Laing
