The charming title of percussionist-composer John Hollenbeck’s new album refers to the multicolored sprinkles atop mounds of ice cream. The 41-year-old composed the title track in celebration of his marriage engagement, and the deliberately out-of-phase teams of vibraphone/drums and guitar/clarinet/accordion indeed conjure the image of tiny cylinders of sugar cascading from spoon to dish.
For “Ziggurat (interior),” the Binghamton, New York, native creates a steam-punk atmosphere with chiming alarm clocks and what sounds like a rhythmically driven Ping-Pong-ball burp-gun battle. This boiler-room clamoring evolves into a satisfying groove in the final minutes of the movement, as though the machinery has finally powered up. Coupling that with the construction-site thumps and dings of “Ziggurat (exterior),” Hollenbeck effectively evokes the erection and inner workings of an eccentric, colossal structure, deftly negotiated here by the Youngstown Percussion Collective and Saxophone Quartet and the Ethos Percussion Group.
The production quality sits the listener among the performers—most effectively with violinist Todd Reynolds’s immaculate execution of the composer’s Gray Cottage Studies, a technical minefield for the violin. Reynolds traverses the glissandi of the underwater, frigid world of “Dustish” with enviable nuance of pitch and bow control. Throughout, Hollenbeck’s fleet stick work and harmonic structures emerge from the jazz idiom, but the language is entirely his own.
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on Dec 16th, 2009