Rapt attention to a raptor: John Yao's Triceratops scores with band's second release

A significant path to move beyond bebop, the lingua franca of modern jazz, has been how to make large ensemble statements with small groups. It's a shrewd test of arranger resourcefulness: pretend to be big and make the textures throb and expand, while allowing solo voices to poke through.  It continues in the 21st century without necessarily being derivative: it avoids the fusion trap of excessive homogenization, and it has long eschewed the formula of head-solos-head that bebop pioneered in its high-wire act, then wore to a frazzle.

John Yao extends a tradition.

The main exemplar was Charles Mingus and his Jazz Workshop bands, typically a half-dozen strong. The charismatic bassist showed others how ten or fewer musicians could straddle the divide between collective and individual energy. Less stellar examples made their points in the late 20th century: The almost-big bands of Manny Albam, the Canadian Rob McConnell's Tentet, and the Frenchman Martial Solal's 12-piece Dodecaband went to the edge of bigness.

The blend of group and individual excellence that Duke Ellington developed was a sustaining inspiration for Mingus. Duke's big band could address Swing Era demands for dance music while providing shrewd, expansive frameworks without the need to appeal to dancers — a smorgasbord for listeners.  Solal specifically refashioned Ellington to create a new mosaic in "Dodecaband Plays Ellington." 

John Yao's Triceratops, in "Off-Kilter," its second release (See Tao Recordings), makes its case for extending this subgenre to today with only five players. Forsaking piano and other keyboards, the group sets its harmonic as well as melodic foundation on three horns: Yao's trombone and the saxophones of Billy Drewes and Jon Irabagon. The wind contingent is supported by bassist Robert Sabin and drummer Mark Ferber.

Some contrapuntal imagination is required by this kind of set-up. In "Below the High Rise," the harmonic spectrum is filled, emptied, and refilled by the horns in a linear texture. Whether improvised or arranged, a small band with big thoughts needs different voices working together or inevitably the group will always seem enlisted in support of one soloist or another. In "Labyrinth," fragments are set out as if they were clues to the maze, not vague wanderings; their significance is boosted by the ensemble's coherence at length.

Sometimes the voices can appear to be at odds with each other, as in the aptly titled "Crosstalk." But any opposition is more apparent than real. Hints of the big-band style may pop up from time to time, as in the riff-based accompaniment behind Yao's fine trombone solo in "The Morphing Line." In this energetic piece, the way the band coalesces gradually, with the trombone the last to join, constructs a statement with the clearest Mingus hallmarks to my ears (minus any leader's shouts that inevitably signal Mingus alone). 

When cleverly put together, the foreground-background mix constantly changes without disintegration. In the title tune, which ends the disc, as Yao and Drewes are placed together behind Irabagon's tenor solo, the rhythm section eventually drops out and we get three horns musing aloud on the material, sustaining the momentum with the help of sporadic drum accents. At length the band comes together, allowing a drum solo to emerge with ensemble backup. "Off-Kilter" allows every man to have his say, but much of it is necessarily shared with his mates. Yet he somehow gets to personalize everything, just as jazz did from its distant origins in New Orleans.

At the listening end, even music-minded plant-eaters are likely to  be charmed by the elegant ferocity of John Yao's Triceratops.