Slow & Steady Records, November 2024

Naomi Moon Siegel is a trombonist with a lustrous, deep sound, exploring the instrument’s earthly edges and celestial potential, as well as a composer of probing patience and diverse methods. A vital part of the Seattle creative music scene until her departure for small-town Montana in 2016, Siegel is blazing a singular path through the landscape of creative jazz in the 21st century. Siegel recounts that since leaving Seattle, navigating this path “has presented a lot of beauty and challenge.” We, the listeners, are the beneficiaries of those challenges.

Siegel’s previous albums, 2016’s Shoebox View and Live at Earshot in 2019, explored eclectic jazz ambience and moody global grooves, offering up sonic landscapes that reward deep listening. The gap before album number three seemed long, but the wait was well worth it. Shatter The Glass Sanctuary is a triumph, a deeply satisfying and challenging new chapter for Siegel, pushing them into a more overtly acoustic jazz realm with minimal electronics. But the album’s elastic compositional adaptability and variety, coupled with the ensemble’s dizzying interpretive and improvisational talents, break deep and varied new ground. 

Siegel has an all-star sextet of acclaimed Seattle musicians onboard: pianist Marina Albero, guitarist Andy Coe, drummer Chris Icasiano, trumpeter Ray Larsen, and bassist Kelsey Mines. The ensemble is a dream team of stylistically nomadic instrumentalists, adept at bringing a composer’s ethos to free form improvisational sections, and interpreting written sections with a subtle sensitivity and dynamism. The album is co-produced by drummer/composer Allison Miller, whose seasoned prominence and focused instincts prove a superb companion and facilitator in the realization of Siegel’s vision.

Uniformly compelling from the first note to the final fade, every track on Siegel’s latest is a highlight, and each musician has their time to shine. The album kicks off by dialing up the jazz quotient on the first couple of tracks, and “Sabotage,” in particular, with its swinging, Monk-ish outlines, almost evokes a Blue Note album. “Seep Into My Pores” is a seamless journey from flamenco to Texas Americana, with striking contributions from trumpeter Larsen, whose velvety, burnished tone is a perfect complement to Siegel’s earthy timbre. The epic journey of the “Shatter The Glass Sanctuary Suite” ranges from the primeval angles and scrapes of free improv to European circus waltzes to somber minor key anthemics and far beyond and includes a particularly spellbinding solo piano interlude from Albero, skirting the edges of her Spanish homeland, 20th century classical experimentalism and free jazz.

Evoking both the tumbling chaos and layered calm of the natural world as well as the range of lived emotional experience, I hear a dreamy melancholy threading through Siegel’s music. In Shatter The Glass Sanctuary, we can also hear the struggle, the joy, and the questioning of life being lived.