JAZZWORD: July 1, 2020
JAZZWORD: July 1, 2020
“Although tenor saxophonist Travis LaPlante recorded Human in his former mountainside home in rural Vermont, no nature sounds intrude. Still this exercise in solo playing has pastoral qualities that could be associated with the birds, trees and wind that affect his improvisational thought processes. Yet LaPlante, who was part of the Battle Trance saxophone quartet, turns to emphatic broken chord inflections and tongue-slapping shadings as early as “Hearing back through the mist”, the first track. Able to jerk his timbres upwards to bugle-like vibrations, he then works his way southwards with a coda of key percussion and strained breaths. This rustic-revolutionary dichotomy pokes through all 10 selections with concentrated blowing without breath pauses featured as well as expressively delicate barely-there air affiliations. At points as on “Song for the invisible”, LaPlante’s forceful trilling extracts split tone from deep inside his horns body tube. While “The Love inside the wind” begins with such ethereal peeps that they could come from a recorder, that is until increased overtones toughen the narrative to includes spurting multiphonics. Crucially the extended and final title track reflects this. Beginning with high-pitched, delicately hiccupping timbres, a repetitive pattern propelled by circular breathing finally reorients the narrative from brief trills to intermittent smears separated by pauses until a gradual moderating of the tone climaxes in silence.”