Sam Wilkes has tried on different identities in his career as an L.A. instrumental envelope-pusher: pop dabbler, on his 2018 debut, Wilkes; loop and beatmaker, on 2021’s Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar, with frequent collaborator Sam Gendel; and instrumental iterator on 2021’s One Theme & Subsequent Iteration, among other releases. Wilkes is an explorer and a chameleon, reconfiguring his band from a cast of L.A. jazz and rock stalwarts for each successive project. Recorded live in 2022 at Kakegawa, Japan’s Festival de Frue and Tokyo club WWW X, iiyo iiyo iiyo is the culmination of these disparate efforts, the distillation of his years riffing, collaborating, and toying with jazz’s edges.
When the festival booked Wilkes, a new configuration of session players took shape: a quintet featuring drummer Craig Weinrib (Henry Threadgill, Amen Dunes) and guitarist Dylan Day (Jenny Lewis, Jackson Browne), with whom Wilkes recently released a trio LP, along with keyboardist Chris Fishman (Pat Metheny, Louis Cole) and keyboardist/guitarist Thom Gill (KNOWER, Joseph Shabason), who represent what Wilkes calls a more “virtuosic, fast-paced” side of his music. This chimera of two groups seemed to spring from the ether, a misunderstanding no one actually suggested—Wilkes thought it was the festival’s idea, and they thought it was his—but was destined nonetheless. Its resulting sound, the product of one five-hour rehearsal, is similarly supernatural: plaintive, peripatetic, and full of wonder, journeyman’s jazz that’s as warm and saturated as a ’70s living room.
“Descending (Frue),” the first of the record’s seven meandering songs (a different version featured on Wilkes’ 2018 debut), showcases Fishman’s nimble arpeggiated riffs on a Moog, a descent more like stepping into a conversation pit than anything perilously steep. Whether it’s the Los Angeles of it all or Wilkes’ experience composing music for the film Malcolm & Marie with Gendel, there’s a cinematic quality to the record that strengthens its trance-like grip. One can imagine the sweat beading on the players’ brows during the heightened end of “Rain & Snow,” or the eye contact that might help Weinrib and Wilkes lead the rest of the group through a slippery time change. Jazz is not a contact sport, necessarily, but here, it’s a collection of charged particles—you couldn’t splice together these sounds from a few stacked studio recordings. The songs are electrified by intimacy and time.
“Rain & Snow” is the record’s most alchemical track, a locked-in groove that transcends even its own mighty parts. What begins as a shuffling plod builds steadily into wilder, more animal stuff as Wilkes’ sinuous basslines flit between Weinrib’s timekeeping, birdlike and vivacious. The song changes direction slyly, dipping briefly into a bossa nova rhythm before it cedes to a Bill Frisell-like guitar line around minute four. The trajectory takes the listener far beyond the expected planes of beauty and melody, even if those traits never quite disappear under the fug of synths and loops. The musicians follow their own invisible wavelength, the tempo dissolving briefly around minute seven only to reconstitute as the album’s funkiest, liveliest foot-tapping riff, held aloft on the duet between Wilkes’ bass and Day’s and Gill’s keyboard and guitar.
Even “I Want to Be Loved,” the quintet’s baleful, Western take on a Dinah Washington standard, goes in unexpected and delightful directions—is that a faint whoop at the 30-second mark? Pedal steel like a desert dusk backlights a meandering electric guitar riff, kinetic against the steady rake of Weinrub’s brush on the snare.
iiyo iiyo iiyo’s arrangements cast Wilkes’ songs in new constellations that balance the comfort of familiarity with the marvel of the unknown. Put one city’s most talented jazz heads in one room, on one stage, and what ensues is a continuous, origami-like folding and unfolding of forms—from the same old material, new and wondrous shapes.
