Joe Westerlund - Curiosities from the Shift Joe Westerlund

During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? The result is
aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with friends decorating this space alongside him.
In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund reached out to friends—Califone’s Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.
Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album’s insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, this is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.