Sam Gendel was a saxophonist first and guitarist second. “My heart belongs to the saxophone, but guitar is my secret lover,” he told an interviewer a couple years ago. With both instruments at his side, he works primarily in a psychedelic jazz trio alongside drummer Kevin Yokota and guitarist Adam Ratner. Under Gendel’s direction, the group performed as Inga until recently, when they began releasing music under Gendel’s given name. Separately, Gendel plays support in Moses Sumney’s trio, and has just recently released his own wholly solo material of one-take live recordings of saxophone and wavedrum loops preserved to his iPhone voice memo app. Gendel has spent the last couple years as a searching musician, and his debut full-length for Terrible Records, 4444, sounds exploratory but sure of itself.
It wasn’t until some later Inga recordings that Gendel began singing, and he’s extended the effort on 4444, a smoothly psychedelic record dominated by hushed voice. Gendel barely plays the saxophone here, instead streamlining a guitar style he’s been developing over the years. In that way, 4444 feels like a simultaneous exploration of a pair of tones. Most every moment and accompanying sound on the album pays service to his settling into both.
Gendel sings quietly and at a pattering pace reminiscent of his guitar playing, where his muted staccato attack sounds like tiptoeing over the fretboard in socks. He sometimes sings in unison with his guitar for a silvery effect, and Yokota’s percussion seems to double instead of define his trajectory. All of this sounds smooth but dense, wrinkled with a passionate and meditative meticulousness instead of a detached technicality.
If the playing is grounded, Gendel’s lyrics tend toward floaty, guileless pietism. On “No Place For This” he sings, “Anger is not an answer,” his voice lifting upwards and more loudly at the end of the phrase. At the end of the album, a hidden track begins with a withered home recording of a child belting out lines from Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle’s famous children book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Gendel carries forward the lyrical device of trading perspectives, trying to see the world through other eyes as a sort of radical awareness. At another point, he borrows lines from the Native American poet-activist John Trudell, channeling the late artist’s existential exasperation. “Look at us, we are healing/Look at them, their medicine is patented,” Gendel sings. On “DAVE” he instead sounds dire and a little corny in his ruminations. “The drones are reigning hellfire on the Dalai Lama/As English majors have a fight about the Oxford comma,” he bites, and later, “The aliens were gonna visit but they’re gonna wait.”
That song is also the album’s funkiest fusion, plodding along at a start-stop pace that eventually gives way to the album’s dizziest and busiest moment, Gendel’s sax panting circles in the background. Elsewhere, it sounds like Ratner that plays a gliding solo of elongated single notes on “Lof” while Gendel doodles a mantra in the background. Similarly, the open strumming on “Portrait Orchid Gun” by Brazilian guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento at the end of the album feels like an abrupt program change. These small moments position Gendel’s muted tone as the centerpiece from which things deviate.
Gendel channels a spiritual mysticism in both his music and the way he talks about it. His lyrics shape a vague, flower-child politics and his sounds are cerebral and psychedelic. For 4444, he encourages listening to the record in reverse tracklist order as a sort of secondary study. Doing so doesn’t flesh out a conceptual revelation from the lyrics, but restaging the tracks does reposition the album’s pace and sense of direction. In reverse order, instead of expanding outward, Gendel’s music starts expansive and then narrows in, drilling down meditatively. It’s a strange effect that playing 4444 backwards sounds even more like an artist settling into their voice.
