The music of reed players Joan Hutton and Sue Orfield can best be described as serious fun. Their well-crafted songs – mostly originals – are as thoughtful as they are playful. They tap in to the brain and the heart in a way that may make you forget you’re tapping a foot or shaking your butt – or vice versa.
Splash is the pair’s second disc together, following their 2022 debut, Take That Back, also on the formidable Shifting Paradigm label. Like that disc, this one features Hutton on alto sax and bass clarinet and Orfield, on tenor sax, in a quintet that tours its Midwest climes, also, as Take That Back.
If Hutton’s style is brainy and Orfield’s is brawny, the two couldn’t be more perfectly paired. Each brings something of interest to the other’s game. Best of all, they know it and know how to work it well – together. Their chemistry is as palpable as it is engaging and, well, fun.
Based on many of the song titles here, Splash is all about memories. Even a cursory listen suggests that many of these recollections are happy ones: they’re positively summery. There is a warm, breezy sense of joy on the up-tempo tracks, while the slower songs revel in the peace, comfort and reflections of quiet nights of quiet stars.
The highlights are many: from Hutton’s funky title track, the Eddie Harris-like “Atari Afternoon” and the impressionistic “Lake Rosseau 1980” (named for the resort village in Hutton’s native Canada) to Orfield’s Corea-esque “Wakanda Park” (located in Orfield’s home state of Wisconsin), “#sixfeet” and, the all-too brief slow burn of “For Anita.”
Hutton’s “City Lights and Fireflies” seems, appropriately enough, to take “In a Sentimental Mood” as a launching pad for the composer’s own unique and misty-eyed remembrance. A dreamy take on the timeless reverie “Moon River,” the album’s only non-original, gets a classical twist that feels like something altogether new. Hutton’s unique arrangement here remarkably reinvents even this well-worn standard.
This is a quintet that has an intuitive, even uncanny, connection with one another. Sympathetic is putting it mildly; it’s almost supernatural. Adding dimension to the group is Ted Godbout on piano, Kameron Markworth on bass and David Schmalenberger on drums and percussion.
Godbout takes some notable solos on “Splash,” “#sixfeet” “Moon River” and “Wakanda Park” – where a welcome influence of Don Pullen seems to creep in – while Markworth shines on “Atari Afternoon” and “For Anita.” These are players who contribute as much as they support.
Splash is a big step forward for Joan Hutton and Sue Orfield. Theirs is jazz that is as thoughtful as it is joyful. On their own, both are popular players – in multiple aggregates – throughout the mid-west. Together, they have the potential to make something of a real, well, you know what, everywhere else.