About a quarter of the way into “Sweet Fire,” Sam Gendel interrupts himself with a raspy, scraping yelp. Moments before, he’d been skronking away on his C-melody saxophone, lobbing a torrent of notes into the spaces around Sam Wilkes’ bouncing bassline. Suddenly, his voice erupts, as though he’s been stung by a hornet or grabbed hold of a searing hot pan. It’s not a howl of pain, but a fleeting exorcism, the power of the jam compelling him to release the spirit. In true call-and-response jazz tradition, he puts the sax back to his lips and conjures a couple of equally coarse honks from the instrument before resuming his dexterous cascade.
That flash of primal joy succinctly conveys the feeling of discovery permeating The Doober, the third album in the Los Angeles experimental jazz duo’s Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar series. As on their first two records, the pair culled these songs from live performances, editing out the audience but keeping the crackling energy intact. Studios allow artists to shape, overdub, and edit their way into an idea, but playing live is inherently raw; feeling the vibe of a room, communicating without speaking, and leaving space for chance are more immediate paths to transcendence. The Doober is another document of these musicians’ innate chemistry and trust, finding magic in the journey with no real destination in mind.
Many of these songs are covers—or at least they start that way. There’s nothing especially faithful about these versions; Gendel and Wilkes are more interested in spacious textural exploration. On “Rugged Road,” they extract the chorus melody from Judee Sill’s yearning psych-folk classic “There’s a Rugged Road” and turn it into a wriggling, cartoonish mass. As the intensity builds, Gendel and Wilkes somersault over each other, layers of sax and bass swirling into a Tasmanian Devil cloud before collapsing, grinning and exhausted. In their hands, Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” becomes a modal study, shifting around itself like a deconstructed Rubik’s Cube. As the minimal drum machine pattern gets more motorik, Wilkes locks his Fender P-Bass into a repetitive groove while Gendel builds a tower of looped drones. Each track on The Doober is a framed photo of outer space, presenting the infinite in a digestible container.
They’re not innovators of form here—jazz musicians have long treated entries in the canonical songbook as blueprints rather than maps. Gendel and Wilkes do it with a cheeky sense of abandon. Their choice of interpolations is sometimes absurd—who knew there was such an aching, rain-streaked jazz number at the heart of Sheryl Crow’s “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the opening theme for perhaps the worst James Bond movie? In the final minute and a half of “Ben Hur,” one of the album’s finest moments, the duo’s cover of Miklós Rózsa’s “Love Theme (From Ben Hur)” melts deliciously into Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Gendel’s sax pooling around a bizarre clip-clop percussion loop. There’s a palpable glee to the album, an almost mischievous acknowledgment that any piece of music can become an invitation to greater freedom.
