Tina Dico, Ben Allison and Steve Tibbetts

Tina Dico's insouciant alto sounds like no other voice. She's not an aspirating waif, despite her Danish good looks. Instead, there's the hint that she could eat you for breakfast, if she cared. She's like an updated Tracy Chapman with her no-nonsense delivery, deft acoustic picking and songs of yearning. This peculiar $5 video of "On the Run," a catchy, reflective number on the peripatetic life, is from Dico's upcoming album, "Count to Ten." The video looks as it might have been discovered in an isolated cache in Joshua Tree National Park -- the last recorded images of Tina Dico before her disappearance.

Whenever some fool goes on about the death of jazz (as if such an improvisatory medium could stop mutating), play that misguided soul some of "Little Things Run the World," the latest album from New York bassist Ben Allison and his band Man Size Safe. Allison has been getting a lot of ink from notable critics praising his merger with rock or folk. Rock? I'm not sure what they are hearing. This is assuredly jazz that deconstructs all influences, with harmonic chromaticism in an intriguing dialogue with hummable modal melodies. On the lead track, "Respiration" (streamable second track on the player for the above-linked website), guitarist Steve Cardenas bravely takes his solo to Ribot-like territory in which the guitar noticeably goes out of tune. One may be reminded of similar excursions by guitarists as varied as Thurston Moore and Ornette Coleman's double whammy of Charles Ellerbee and Bern Nix on "Dancing in Your Head." Becoming a musical device, you never forget it. And check out Allison's mischievously skipping bass lines, punctuating all the permutations of the beat.

Minneapolis-based guitarist Steve Tibbetts rarely records or performs. ECM Records issues one of his haunting, musical gnosis, seemingly out of the ether, every once in a blue moon. Akin to Michael Brook and Eno's more ambient work, the more uncharitable might label him New Age, but not many New Agers get that howling, desperate sound like the wind sweeping through the cerulean peaks of the Hindu Kush, close to where Tibbetts has spent so much of his time in the last 20 years. Listen to three tracks from "Selwa," a collaboration recorded with Choyung Drolma, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, in 2004. A video of a concert in 2005 reveals Tibbetts playing an acoustic 12-string. Listen for the soul-shaking bottom end on the 12-string when Tibbetts kicks it in. Listener be wary: Time may suspend.

-- Casey Dolan

[Photo: Ben Allison. Credit: Jimmy Katz / Palmetto Records]

Comments

[casey dolan]

I have a correction/addendum to what I wrote above. The Hindu Kush was an unfortunate locale to mention for Tibbetts. He spent much time in Nepal, several hundred miles to the east, not to mention that the Hindu Kush has a fundamentally Muslim culture, while Drolma is a Tibetan Buddhist. Tibbetts works off that cultural/religious framework.