The addition of bassist Brandon Lopez to the recognized duo of saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey provides proof once more, though maybe not in the manner Aristotle envisaged, that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. The liners allude to the success of the threesome's first gig at Park Slope's Barbes in 2017, and the reasons for their satisfaction can be heard all over the outstanding, unpredictable and empathetic interchange across the six studio improvs contained on No Es La Playa.

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/john-sharpes-best-jazz-albums-of-2022

A MARVELLOUSLY inventive trio here: saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock born in Stadtlohn, Germany; Los Angeles drummer Tom Rainey and the young composer and insurgent of the bass Brandon Lopez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican roots. Together they concoct and converse like three sonic sorcerers.
Rainey is some drummer, conjuring every conceivable surface with a transformative artistry. The New York studio engineer picks up every iota of his sound. Laubrock plays a skittering soprano saxophone on the title track: all through When the Island is a Shipwreck her tenor sax rasps, resonates and guffaws.
Alongside and below all this is Lopez’s gambolling bass. “I try to blind everything out and be totally in the moment,” he says, and such moments abound. His strings bounce sorbo-like through Saturnian Staring and his bow-work crackles in Camposanto Chachacha. The finale, The Black Bag of Want, speaks for us all: a scintillating threesome.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/album-reviews-with-chris-searle-november-28-2022

Bassist Brandon López is a plangent, almost granitic presence on recordings and the live stage. His articulation and rich, oval sound stake out a broad and responsive territory in ensemble improvisations. His playing has a balance between his careful listening and the certainty of his responses. He means what he says and he says what he means. At least that is so in his playing; his words are cagier. In a recent email exchange meant to explore his musical thinking, to find out the motivations that has a musician taking on what is the artistically important but economically thankless path of jazz-based and free improvisation, he offers intriguing clues but deflects most exploration.

He has an upcoming residency at The Stone, where he will be playing a solo set one night. About the challenges of playing a solo bass concert, he writes, "the physicality of double bass technique presents a monumental challenge in solo playing. The instrument was developed to reinforce the cello section in an orchestra. It is meant to be felt, not heard. You have to be in great physical shape to get around the instrument and technique takes hours and hours of maintenance every week."

How did he pick up the bass and how did his path take him to The Stone? "I come from a musical family and from a culture that values music," López explains. "My great uncles were well respected musicians and bandleaders in Puerto Rican and Nuyorican music. I was always interested in music." But he goes on to say that "public school music class and a natural distaste for performance kept me away from an instrument until I was 12 or 13. I haven't been able to stop playing since." What happened in his early teen years that wiped away his previous distaste and how playing the bass turned into becoming an improvising musician, is "too messy for me to really comprehend or turn into a cohesive narrative. I'd rather keep from spewing bullshit and most of the information has to be banal." As to influences, he responds: "I can give an exhaustive and incomplete list, but I'd rather refrain."

Perhaps, but life is the fuel for creativity and what López imagines to be banal to others includes the things that make him the player he is. Few of us are good judges of the quality of the stories within us, whether those come out in words or in music, and the critical listener often hears things that are not only interesting but also, because they are so integrated in the source, are invisible to the musician playing them. He does listen to himself critically, however. "I consistently record and listen to myself," he explains. "It's a means to process what is and isn't working within my work. I can then, ideally, make compositional decisions and control certain impulses in the future. I don't think this is too dissimilar from boxers, football players, sport teams watching footage of past games. When your work deals with the present, recordings help in dealing with the process."

A run of recent recordings includes collaborations with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey, the Whit Dickey Trio and the sensational Moten/López/Cleaver, featuring the spoken words of poet Fred Moten and drums of Gerald Cleaver. The latter stands out for what is easily the deepest listening from López caught on record, each note shaped to give both space and full support to Moten.

Other than hinting at how he listens to himself, the bassist is resolute about not revealing his musical process. Curiosity about how improvisation for him is different than playing previously composed and notated material elicits an argument about the interviewer "centering the conversation on a particular European tradition" and the claim that musical notation, which dates back to at least around 1500 years BCE, with non-Western origins, "was developed as a means to record and sell music before there was audio recording technology." Curiosity about his approach to rhythmic structures in improvisation is returned with didactic questions as to whether the interviewer understands the meaning and history of the "jazz tradition".

He does allow, however, that he finds rhythmic synchronization through improvisation is integrated into his playing. "It happens and it happens often," he notes. "When working with great improvisers who are engaged, there's never a lack of rhythmic or formal coordination. There's plenty of recorded material that I'm part of that showcases this and it happens plenty in a live setting."

For those who care about the "jazz" tradition in the broadest sense, from the blues and 19th Century dance music to Cecil Taylor and, well, Brandon López, there are worthwhile things to explore in how musicians think improvisationally, vis-a-vis the vast head-solo-head-double bar, song-form based music from the first half of the 20th Century. But López dismisses the topic: "I don't understand how improvised music is different from 'formally structured music'. When great improvisers work there...

This trio collaboration - of long-time partners Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey on saxes and drums, joined by young Puerto Rican New Yorker Brandon Lopez on bass - emerged from an impromptu performance in Brooklyn's almost deserted Barbès bar in 2017. Laubrock and Rainey hit it off so intuitively with Lopez that their trio coalesced by osmosis rather than negotiation, on top of which this studio recording taps a fortuitously prolific seam of music-making for them in the lockdown months of shared online experimentation. All the pieces on No Es La Playa are unflinchingly non-generic free-jazzy originals, but they draw on a wide span of traditional and contemporary sonic and structural resources all three have routes into. Lustrous-toned tenor-sax reflectiveness turns to barrelling uptempo freebop over Lopez' fast bass walk and Rainey's scampering free-swing on the title piece, while the final track's 'The Black Bag Of Want' moves from an intro of slewing bowed-bass sounds snapped at by Rainey's snare hits and cantering tattoos, to a development in raw tenor multiphonics over a headlong rhythmic sprint in which Lopez and Rainey seem indivisibly joined.

In between come the squally tenor-blow 'When the Island is a Shipwreck' (ending up unexpectedly close to the Cool School's cryptic lyricism); the ethereal, tonally-nuanced soprano feature 'Saturnian Staring'; 'Camposanto Chachacha, with its freewheeling solo-tenor centrepiece and staccato closing section driven by Lopez' furiously precise bowing, and the spacious, abstract 'Little Distance Before'. No Es La Playa -'it's not the beach' - accurately defines this album's resistance to any form of indolence, but if it's often edgy free-jazzmaking, it's in a very articulate league.

Brandon Lopez is a strong bassist. It is possible one could measure that with the equations for force and power, but it is less about physicality than how every note he plays has a purpose: there is an intent behind it and a direction in front of it. Nothing is wasted and so everything he plays has a substantial presence.

Of the three trio albums under review, the most intriguing and outstanding is the eponymous release with drummer Gerald Cleaver and poet Fred Moten. A remarkable thing is how musical it is. Poetry and jazz has been long on theatrics - and text, of course -but only rarely does it hit the balance of presenting the poetry as poetry with accompaniment that makes it sound like spoken song. Call that a contradiction, but with Moten's gravity, his smooth, slow-paced flow, like Dexter Gordon playing a ballad, there is a huge central focus to the proceedings. Lopez and Cleaver play with the same pace, a deliberate determination, active but never busy. Every gesture has a point and produces an aesthetic and emotional reverberation. This album mesmerizes quickly.

The other two are relatively more straight forward, at least in instrumentation: Lopez with drummer Tom Rainey and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and then with drummer Bill Harris and Jim Baker, who plays piano and ARP synthesizer. This is improvised music, maybe not completely spontaneous, but the emphasis is on individual and group exploration, not formally developing tunes. Intriguingly, they set the grooves on the Moten/Lopez/Cleaver album into relief, with Moten articulating words, rhythm becomes the invisible material that binds the musicians.

Laubrock has great command and there is just as much playing with timbre and texture as creating pitched material on No es la playa. This has Lopez often blending in using the bow while Rainey drops in crisp attacks, uses quick rolls to stitch in sonic gauze. This is a collective effort and solid, though also a bit difficult to distinguish from the hundreds of improvised saxophone-bass-drums trio albums out there. Like the Lake Wobegon Children, this is one of many that are "above average".

Dura hits a sweet spot between the other records. The piano cements the music around exact tuning and pitches - Baker uses the synthesizer for textures and sonic experimentation - and one result is that the playing has some of the spaciousness of the Moten/Lopez/Cleaver album and, like it, the empty spaces give the music more substance and dimension. Baker has some subtle Monk-ish attacks and phrasing in his playing and, once having heard this in a short phrase, there is a lot of anticipation for the quality to return. Lopez is again prominent and that seems to be because of the space. That is where he sounds most comfortable and articulate, playing music that has air around each note, the kind of thoughtful clarity that comes from listening to oneself say exactly what you mean. That the song titles all refer to horrible diseases seems like a statement of intent that is in no way discernible in the music.