Stretch music, according to New Orleans jazz musician Christian Scott, is an approach that engenders a more absorbent and sensitive kind of jazz. "We are attempting to stretch—not replace—jazz's rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can," he says on his website. He titled his fifth album after the concept, but this sensibility is visible even in his earliest work as a leader; the title track of 2007's Anthem is jazz in its instrumentation, but it also obeys the rhythms and structures of post-hardcore, a series of contrasting shapes which build an atomically tense and spectral space, like a cathedral at night.
His description of "stretch music" somewhat resembles the omnivorous jazz approaches of bassist/singer Esperanza Spalding and pianist Robert Glasper. It's similarly collaborative and elastic. But Scott's genre splicing is not as mosaic as Glasper's. It’s doesn’t lock different genres together in unusual patterns as much as it melts them down into asymmetrical and indivisible sculpture. It's almost curious to call it "stretch music" when it feels as if jazz isn’t so much expanded here as collapsed into small, oblique jewels.
Later in his mission statement, Scott describes his intention to draw unusual instruments through distortion. This is how Stretch Music begins: A piano, played by Lawrence Fields, struggles through noise, as if pressing and blurring against a force field. Instruments undergo a kind of metamorphosis in Scott’s aesthetic, which is reflected in the album cover: his trumpet bends and warps into elastic shapes.
On record, Scott’s playing is patient and crisp, and it seems the product of spatial reasoning, more concerned with the area around his notes than their actual occurrence. He is sometimes accompanied by the ribbony flute phrases of Elena Pinderhughes, which contrast pleasingly with the routine collapse of the backdrop.
This collapse is occasioned by the percussion, played by Corey Fonville and Joe Dyson, Jr., alternately on drums and SPD-SX pads. Snare rolls are enhanced into dense exaggerations, glitching in and out of compressed rattles which physically approach vortexes of static. It lends the songs the accelerated yet organized rhythms of accident; it reminds me of sparks convulsing from a severed cable.
Sometimes the instrumentation is more obscure, as on "Tantric" and "Perspectives", each chord landing and shimmering with a kind of blurred phosphorescence. There are also more typical fusion exercises, as on "West of the West", where Matthew Stevens’ guitar recalls the metallic echo of Sonny Sharrock.
When Scott played at this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he said "West of the West" describes the sense of dislocation he felt when he lived in L.A., a place that seems unlocked from its own geography, released into imaginary and aggressively blank space. His music is the opposite of dislocated; it is thoroughly articulated, busy and compressed. The reach of Stretch Music can often feel literal—even as the threads warp and drift a deeply woven structure is preserved.
