Steph Richards: Power Vibe

Fire music. Free jazz. Third stream. Fourth stream. Avant improv, noise chamber blues, and whatever the meta and hashtags say it is, this sextet of loose cannons knows better and holds all the cards.

Imagine for a moment what the reaction might be if your facial muscles suddenly, involuntarily, started to freeze, leaving you without expression and, without your art. Trumpeter Steph Richards, a halcyon force on the expanding concepts of free music, responded by making Power Vibe easily the most emboldened and venturesome statement of her ascendant career.

A whole lot is going on throughout the incendiary totality of Power Vibe . If you are distracted even for a moment, you will miss something. "Prey" opens tested and true enough: Richards' trumpet breaks the silence. Cymbal's jangle, but then sensory electronics—drum-triggered sensors creating their own tactile, yet oddly ethereal rhythms courtesy of Max Jaffe—propel and tangle, intertwine and disappear, inspiring each instrument to find its way.

The title track is a monster. Pianist Joshua White—caught up in a McCoy Tyner-like fervor—runs away with "Power Vibe" and listening to the rest of the ensemble try to catch up is beyond bracing and bold, it is a wanton privilege. Gerald Cleaver bashes and pounds. Jaffe's textures do their thing. Bassist Stomu Takeishi thrums across his five strings like a stormtrooper. Richards,' a furious improviser who never stands down, runs straight through and around, breaks, bounds and cuts. When it is all said and done, "Power Vibe" has seven of the fiercest minutes experienced this year or the next ten or in a lifetime.

Pulling from all her resources—Richards has worked alongside Yoko Ono, David Byrne, Henry Threadgill, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson. "October to July (for Dorian)" flows moody and mournful on the heels of "Power Vibe." Forlorn and richly sensuous, Richards' flugelhorn calls out to the powers that seek to wrest control of her muscles, her life and her work: let her keep her voice! What semblance of control can anyone embrace if they cannot control their own movements? Each daredevil responds in kind.

"Moutons," a creation theory all its own, follows. Richards and Takeishi take the lead as Jaffe slinks in then all hell breaks loose via the crashing tides of White and Cleaver. Shrapnel of sound logic sprays forward and becomes "Reculez." Quixotic, alluring, recorded live in Bolzano, Italy "Supersense" (the epic namesake of her 2020 Northern Spy album) brings Power Vibe to a fiery, climatic close.

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