On Angelica Sanchez

The pianist and composer's recent music for trio and nonet

Angelica Sanchez’s Sparkle Beings, from 2022, is an immersing trio date for which the pianist and composer is joined by bassist Michael Formanek, one of Sanchez’s longtime collaborators, and drummer Billy Hart, whom she first met at a summer-music institute when she was in her late teens. Hart was born in 1940, Formanek in ’58, Sanchez in ’72, and their cross-generational braid mirrors the lineage of influence and affinity drawn by the four composers interpreted on the album: Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Mario Ruiz Armengol, and Cecil Taylor. The album’s four original pieces, each, in Sanchez’s preferred language, created in the moment, cohere with the interpretations and make such divisions (between composition, arrangement, improvisation, and simply playing) blurry and insufficient.

Sanchez and I talked over the phone this past weekend about Sparkle Beings and her practice in general. The conversation was inspiring; from a lazy distance, I envied her students. It was also unrecorded, and my shorthand, which isn’t shorthand, has declined. I can’t quote her at length. For her own voice, you could search out two interview podcasts, one hosted by Lawrence Peryer, another by Brian Pace, or a written interview conducted by Rob Shepherd of PostGenre. When I asked Sanchez if she was using the phrase “created in the moment” synonymously with “freely improvised,” she told me creation feels more accurate to her than improvisation, and more in phase with how her elders and models talk. She doesn’t draw a bold line between making music on the spot and writing a score, such as those she created for last year’s Nighttime Creatures, a set of multihued compositions for nonet. Either way, the goal is to use overlapping language toward “intimacy at the highest level,” with her fellow musicians, with the listener.

In the religious tradition I grew up in, ministers by and large wrote their sermons but would sometimes preach extemporaneously. The procedures were different, but, if it was the same preacher, the core experience and training—in homiletics, in theology, in life—would also be the same. (I’m not saying music functions well as “secular religion.”) Sanchez’s music, lots of music, coaxes from me a tempered and perhaps self-congratulatory idealism. It exemplifies a kind of communication and concentration, admitting leadership and ambition but resistant to hierarchy, that, if broadly applied, could be narrowly ameliorating.

Sparkle Beings is a contemplative, patient album, serious but not brooding. Sanchez, Pheonix-raised but based in New York since the midnineties, plays with an expanse of emotion and reference. Thelonious Monk and Geri Allen were formative, still-detectable influences. You can hear Monk’s compositional imprint, too, on the arrowy title track from Nighttime Creatures. A few other associations came to mind while revisiting Sparkle Beings, both off the mark as sound rhymes but possibly relevant. The album’s synesthetic experience—treading water in bobbing oceanic waves, tasting but not gulping salt—chimes with trio albums, such as Storyteller, by Marilyn Crispell, with whom Sanchez has recorded as duo. And on pieces such as “Generational Bonds,” her impressionistic lyricism, blinking chords, and harmonic liberty reminded me of Herbie Hancock. Just as new parents, it’s said, can distinguish the cries of their own baby from those of forty other babies being tended to on another floor of an under-construction rec center during a hailstorm, devoted jazz collectors can recognize the Steinway B housed in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio from a single minor-seventh chord pipping out of a passing Toyota Corolla with its windows up. I’m not there yet, but Sparkle Beings was recorded at the revived Van Gelder Studio, now operated by Maureen Sickler, so Sanchez was sitting at the same piano on which Hancock and hundreds of others made foundational records. The piano sounds fantastic, with fitting sparkle up top and warmth without mud in the midrange.

Like Cecil Taylor, for one, Sanchez will sometimes worry a phrase, repeat and mutate it as if massaging a pressure point. You can hear this just past the four-minute mark on “Generational Bonds.” Sometimes a single note will get similar treatment, needling us or turning into a Roadrunner beep beep. Sanchez will play softly and sparsely, dig into a blues lick, or turn forte chords and runs into a ceremonial unleashing of doves. Hart and Formanek, unsurprisingly, are responsive and inciting. I especially love Formanek’s beeloud upper-register solo on “Generational Bonds” and his boinging slides on “With (Exit).” Hart is an HVAC system and the weather itself. All of it: his rolling, bedrock toms and his more centerstage work at the top of “Sparkle”; his expressive brushwork; his theatrical cymbals, spread like petals across the stereo field by mix engineer Ryan Streber. The record is mainly open, and it’s a pleasure when the trio falls into a walk during part of the titular piece.

The four interpretations have a cartographic logic: Ellington was a beacon for Williams and Taylor; Williams and Taylor were mutually admiring; Armengol, a Mexican composer and pianist previously unknown to me, was celebrated by Ellington. By including pieces from Williams and Taylor on the same album, Sanchez recalls the performance Williams and Taylor gave, with support from Bob Cranshaw and Mickey Roker, at Carnegie Hall in the spring of ’77. The concert reportedly engendered some friction between the artists and was something of a cause célèbre in the notorious sense, though it was praised, too, and on the Pablo album of the concert, Embraced, the crowd is enthusiastic. Philip Freeman’s latest book, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, includes a balanced account.

Sparkle Beings opens with Williams’s “A Fungus Amungus,” originally released as a solo piece in 1964 and reprised in variation on Zoning, partly as a laid-back jam in 7/4 bricklayed in ’74. The composition is built from an arresting chromatic phrase, a hip ringtone before the fact, played by Sanchez’s trio in unison. Williams’s original recording builds to tumult and embodies abstraction while twitting a certain clinicalism or all-containing nothingness. It lunches at a shared border between satire, sincerity, and virtuosity, near the spot occupied by the John Shade cantos in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Sanchez’s version cooks. Taylor’s singular structures, though they contain composed elements the listener comes to recognize and expect, are rarely interpreted. Their iconoclasm might discourage the effort. A 2023 album by the French guitarist Noël Akchoté, who’s extremely productive as an interpreter, is one exception. “With (Exit),” from 1966’s Conquistador (recorded by Van Gelder) is novelistic in the original, more contained in Sanchez, Formanek, and Hart’s performance. One of the joys of Taylor’s atonality and sometimes bewildering approach is how it can gild and relieve simple intervals, such as how B-F#-D# sounds like starshine on “With (Exit).”

Armengol, among other works, wrote a series of lovely miniatures for children. The Sanchez Trio’s mysterious version of “Preludio a un Preludio” highlights Formanek. The Ellington piece, “The Sleeping Lady and the Giant that Watches Over Her,” comes from his Latin American Suite. The warmest melody on Sparkle Beings, it closes the album as waving trapezist. The trio plans to record upcoming sets at the Jazz Gallery with an eye toward a live album. Sanchez has also been leading a quartet with trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, bassist John Hébert, and drummer Rudy Royston.

Her nonet’s long-in-the-making Nighttime Creatures is made up of intricate compositions with sylvan inspirations, finely wrought but not too snugly wrapped. Streber returns, now engineering, too, at Oktaven Audio. The music is richly orchestrated, the group inventively configured. Along with Sanchez, they are, as listed alphabetically on the sleeve: Michaël Attias, alto saxophone; Ben Goldberg, contra alto clarinet; Hébert, bass; Thomas Heberer, quarter-tone trumpet; Sam Ospovat, drums; Chris Speed, tenor and clarinet; Omar Tamez, guitar; and Kenny Warren, cornet. Everyone is great, but I’ll single out Goldberg and Tamez mostly because this is my introduction to them. Like Sparkle Beings, the more recent album makes room for an Ellington tune. “Lady of the Lavender Mist,” first issued by Columbia in 1948, is a romantic melody, in the original a showcase for the reeds and for trombonist Lawrence Brown. Sanchez’s arrangement is a reinvention of rare beauty, played with outstretched arms, the quarter-tone trumpet adding a wonderful rub at times. The program notes point nocturnal, Ellington’s title in another direction, but for me this version is verdant and sunlit. I thought of the Sondheim of Sunday in the Park with George, and then I didn’t think at all.