Earshot Jazz Festival

October 26
Anne Drummond Quartet
The Triple Door, 7:30, $20 BUY ONLINE

Flutist Anne Drummond grew up in two distinctly different but equally influential musical environments. She first attended Seattle’s Garfield High School, where she participated in the school’s widely recognized and admired jazz program. Drummond speaks of this time as being very fertile for her musical ambitions. She felt like her fellow musicians, her instructors, and the parents involved made up one big family that endlessly fostered her growth as a musician.

After graduating from high school, Drummond moved across the country in order to study piano at the Manhattan School of Music. Equipped with the tools for musical exploration that her experience at Garfield had given her, Drummond felt “like a kid in a candy store” in New York, which she enthusiastically endorses as the best place to grow as an artist. The variety of influences that Drummond has encountered in the decade since she moved to New York is explored on her recently released album, Like Water.

The pieces on Like Water evolve in a way that feels similar to the way the album itself must have been created. Drummond had been working on chamber compositions that leaned towards the work of master 20th-century composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel when pianist Klaus Mueller (one of two pianists who appear on the album) swung her attention towards Brazilian rhythms. Rather than abandon her earlier projects, Drummond chose to combine her latest inspirations with what she had already been writing, resulting in an album that waxes candid violin and cello tones over echoing Latin beats.

Drummond’s compositions and solos work their way through soft, slowly developing contrasts, some more obvious and some subtler than the immediately noticeable fusion of Brazilian and European styles. At the beginning of a tune, her music can arrive in carefully plucked string arrangements that briefly lull listeners into a secure pattern while recalling the flutist’s classical influences. The piano nudges its way in, letting chords drift into the spaces that the strings have left open. She displays developments against the grain that enter so quietly that it quickly feels as if these new rhythms were there all along. With the foundation set, Drummond’s flute flutters in as a butterfly, with phrases whose wings beat slower and slower until they come to rest on the bending branches presented by the strings that felt so stable just a moment before.

There are no violins or cellos in Drummond’s current live group, however. She feels that the group she plays with in concert (a quartet, as opposed to the quintet with strings that plays on her album) represents a more raw, stripped down version of the same vibe that the album contains; not to say that the musicians in the live group will not bring their own presence to the music at hand. Drummond insists that her greatest influences are the musicians she plays with, so one can be sure that a fresh set of play will only contribute new interpretations to the ideas displayed on her album.

– Nathan Buford

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