Ross Hammond / Oliver Lake / Mike Pride — Our Place on the Wheel (rosshammond.com)
Our Place On The Wheel by Ross Hammond
The blues and jazz are the closest of kin, and their tradition-bound paths cross and combine too much to untangle. This is just one reason why it’s hard to find a fresh way to put them together. Sacramento-based guitarist Ross Hammond has been making records with jazz musicians and boundary-crossing improvisers for years, but his sound and choices of instruments have grown increasingly blues-oriented in recent years. Our Place On The Wheel is his attempt to make a straight-up blues record while remaining true to his roots in jazz.
Composition takes many forms; for this session, one of them is Hammond’s choice in accompanists. Drummer Mike Pride is an old friend of Hammond’s with a long list of recordings for Aum Fidelity, Public Eyesore, Utech, and his own Funhole label. Alto saxophonist Oliver Lake was a member of the Black Artist’s Group, which was St. Louis’ counterpart to the AACM, as well as a founder of the World Saxophone Quartet. Instrumentation is another compositional choice, and Hammond’s decision to restrict himself to a steel guitar and play it in an idiomatically bluesy way centers the music that the group makes. His tone shimmers and his notes slide and swoop. Even when he departs from overt blues licks, as on the raga-like “Mosaic,” he never loses the vibe. Lake also knows how much tone matters, and the slight sourness he stirs into both chopped-short notes and softer, drawn-out ones adds an essential pungency to the mix. He flies briefly into the altissimo register on the opener, “Low Rent,” but most of the time he eschews overt free jazz moves.
Pride plays with the most freedom. While he isn’t averse to laying down a simple backbeat, as he does on “We’re Well Into The Fall,” more often he elaborates on the groove in ways that depart from both blues and jazz models of drumming. He’s the session’s most frequent agent of surprise, but never at the expense of Hammond’s intentions. His looseness also works to affirm the project’s humility. Hammond and his associates may love the blues, but they aren’t trying to make a big deal about their ardor. Available as a short-run CDR or a digital download, this is one in a steady stream of spontaneous but engaged recordings that the guitarist has kept making while the live music scene has shut down around him.
