Terra rewards the kind of listening that isn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
Corner Store Jazz
Phil Haynes – drums, percussion; Ben Monder – guitar, electronics; Peyton Pleninger – tenor saxophone & bells
The best thing about Terra may be that it surprised everyone involved. The record arrives — quietly, spaciously, as if it could only have sounded exactly this way. Drummer Phil Haynes had reconnected with guitarist Ben Monder after two decades apart, and recently discovered an unlikely rapport with young tenor saxophonist Peyton Pleninger. Haynes thought he was putting together an interesting evening. He was thrilled with what he got.
Spaciousness defines the record from the first moments of “Moonrise Aurora Starlit Meteor.” Chimes give way to guitar, drums enter at a whisper, and Peyton Pleninger’s saxophone arrives late and tentatively, feeling its way in. Nobody’s in a hurry. All of it improvised. Haynes holds back, leaving room, and the music breathes because of it.
Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” arrives near the midpoint, the one standard the trio had agreed to draw on. It opens delicately — pretty guitar, Pleninger’s saxophone entering quietly in his lower register, Haynes barely touching the cymbals. The mood shifts; a touch of dissonance creeps in, Pleninger moves up the horn and plays with more assurance, and the track acquires a mild restlessness before settling back into the guitar alone, the saxophone rejoining only at the very end.
Pleninger, who studied with both Milford Graves and Steve Coleman, sounds immediately at home in the trio’s quieter textural world. At moments his horn sounds less like an instrument than a voice — sometimes a cry, sometimes something closer to a scared animal. When those moments come, Haynes never crowds them, often dropping back to almost nothing underneath, and the empathy in that instinct is one of the things that makes this record special.
Monder, whose profile has grown considerably through his years in The Bad Plus and his work on David Bowie’s Blackstar, shows a different side here. His guitar ranges widely — ringing tones that hang in the air, low drones, the occasional burst of something almost rock before he pulls back into the quieter atmosphere he seems most at home in on this record.
Haynes describes the experience of making the record as “stargazing.” It’s a good word for it. Terra rewards the kind of listening that isn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
