Off By One

AVANT-GARDE JAZZ-ROCK

Here’s a wonderful, strange mashup of jazz, rock, art-song, noise, and weird influences.
By “avant-garde” I don’t mean this is dissonant, bizarre, or difficult, rather that it’s very original and slightly experimental. In fact, it’s quite approachable and a lot of fun. The leader is Polly Moller (see Zookeeper for more) on flute, voice, and occasional guitar. Other instruments are keys, reeds, bass and drums. The group was recently on Wed Night Live.

No FCC issues.


1 ** Mid-tempo, then fast. A wild ride with hard edged guitar (or synth’d guitar?), melodic sax, carnival organ. Movie theme; Irish jig; who knows? Madcap craziness. Love it. (4:08)
2 * Slow, pretty flute intro; tenor sax joins in. Switch to funky elec bass, cutesy elec piano. Then flute & sax counterpoint; then piano & bass clarinet. A sung “text” is “Linear A fragments.” (This Bronze Age script hasn’t been deciphered, thus the title). (7:13)
3 Mid-tempo. Fairly straight funk-jazz on elec piano, tenor sax, bass. Nonsense lyrics were “generated by computer translation chain.” (5:15)
4 Slow. Solo clarinet opens. Then elec piano accompanies a strange sounding art song about birds singing (I think). (2:43)
5 * Mid-tempo. Lovely & gentle prog-rock instrumental with piano, flute, bells, drums. Electric guitar joins in middle. Beautiful and intricate. (7:34)