The Westerlies
Wherein Lies the Good
Westerlies Records

For their third release, the Se­attle-born, now New-York based brass quartet make an incisive contribution to the search for “Americana” in contemporary music today. The quartet— trombonists Andy Clausen & Willem de Koch, and trumpet­ers Riley Mulherkar and Chloe Rowlands—are certainly quali­fied, with genre-spanning group collaborations from Fleet Foxes to Dave Douglas.

Balancing technical skills and creativity, The Westerlies’ latest collection represents American composers and singer/song­writers along with a handful of inventive originals. The vocal qualities of brass instruments, with their variable onset and broad delay, opens up its own world of timbral pos­sibilities. On a standout set of spiritu­als from the Depression Era Golden Gate Quartet, The Westerlies muster the heavenly earthiness of great vocal music, and recall the likes of Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton of the early Ellington bands.

The group’s stunning cohesion and articulation show through the almost classical form of songwriter Judee Sill’s “The Kiss,” while on a version of cel­list/composer Arthur Russell’s plain­tive “Eli,” the original’s textural duel between voice/cello is arranged as if to a full band, the lead trombone muted ingeniously with raspy tin foil.

The album’s title track, “Wherein Lies the Good,” composed originally for piano by Robin Holcomb—a Seattle mentor for the group—func­tions less like a tune and more like a tone poem; a modernist redress­ing of American vernacular music. As the band moves over 11 minutes through solemn Copelandian odes, to off-kilter elegies and helter-skelter anthems, the question of unity grad­ually presents itself, eventually leav­ing the resolution up to the listener.

With their embrace of tension and conflict, jubilation and mourning, The Westerlies voice their answer to Holcomb’s question in the plural. For the quartet, it’s a polyphonic na­tion. –Ian Gwin