JUSTIN JOYCE: Almost Familiar

A Stylish, Sturdy Bridge across Jazz’s Ambivalent Waters
Drummer Justin Joyce is arresting to watch. His playing, metronomically precise yet powerful in a way that brings to mind Joe Morello on one hand and Max Roach on the other, is a masterclass in rhythmic economy. Fastidious and restrained, yet insistent, it lends credence to the perfectionist’s compulsive pursuit and honors the Type A musical mind.

His visual appearance is strikingly and satisfyingly congruent. All acute angles and rodentially streamlined rakishness, styled sharp and clean in tailored vintage clothing and sporting the perfectly manicured mustache of a craft cocktail mixologist, Joyce is a delightful amalgamation of the mid 2010s millennial hipster you know very well and the brand of mid-century mod memorialized and mythologized by The Who’s Quadrophenia. He belongs both to the constantly updating present we’re all swimming in and the decades of the American century past that music lovers live to romanticize, especially if they only know of them second-hand.

Joyce’s music aligns with the man himself. It’s easily recognizable but not to be typecast. Both the musician and his music are almost familiar. Maybe it’s a coincidence that this is literally the name of Joyce’s latest album—Almost Familiar—but I don’t think so.

Recorded with his closest musical colleagues, who double as his closest personal friends, Almost Familiar is everything I think contemporary jazz ought to be in terms of respecting the audiences jazz already has while venturing to cultivate new ones. It’s evidence that the past is alive, but as prologue, that jazz lives—not as artifact or music appreciation seminar but in the present tense, as something drawing breath and evolving in real time—and will only continue to do so if it’s amenable to engaging in good faith dialogue with hip-hop, soul, R&B, and, yes, even classical.

The days of bebop and hard bop talking only amongst themselves are over. And still, Almost Familiar is moving testimony to the idea that the foundational architects of the form and sensibility will always have a seat at the table.

For proof, start with “Dos Hermanos,” a perfect introduction to the telepathic connection between Joyce and Paul Castelluzzo, the polymath guitarist, bandleader, and producer otherwise known as HETHER, whose brilliance is on full display across the album, especially on this one he and his best friend Joyce co-composed. Sean Hicke’s bass and Joyce’s drums come in with that Art Blakey, early ’60s Blue Note feel, and then Castelluzzo introduces a chef’d up, effects-sheened, repeating chromatic lick that takes Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance” and Pat Martino’s psychedelic “Israfel,” stitches them together, and then cauterizes the point of fusion with a lightning bolt.

“Dos Hermanos” YouTube vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-4nJM94OtE&list=OLAK5uy_km3AuOuAyf6_rW7J_M_azdqOROOoLLZT0&index=6

Then there’s “That Was Never,” a 180 from the two brothers’ high-octane cooker. Here we’re treated to a softer, more lyrical Castelluzzo playing really pretty unison lines with violin (Batya MacAdam-Somer) and flutes (Bradley Nash and Travis Klein). Serene and meditative, it’s a ready-made anthem for a Sunday morning that hangs out in first gear until mid-afternoon. Languid and contemplative and tinged, courtesy of the recording studio, with a microdose of something hypernatural, this one comes with permission to indulge in your weekend morning vice of choice…because who’s to say what’s real anyway?

“That Was Never” YouTube vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2LtfBBjroQ&list=RDc2LtfBBjroQ&start_radio=1

Later, let the title track, a companion piece, ease you into that same day’s wind-down, with flutes of detached somnolence a heavenly chorus for Joyce’s ethereal melody on mallets. Things slow considerably now, as you find yourself riding a retro, faux-wood paneled elevator that may be moving vertically or laterally or both. Don’t stress; it’s hard to think of anything at all in suspended animation. Shahhh….vasana.

“Almost Familiar” YouTube vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRHo9UFr4DU&list=OLAK5uy_km3AuOuAyf6_rW7J_M_azdqOROOoLLZT0&index=9

By Monday morning, you’re ready for “Ciao Bella,” a gospel-infused swinger rooted in the soul jazz of Cannonball Adderley and Ahmad Jamal. Joyce’s elegant brushing melds precision and soft power, letting Ed Kornhauser’s pianism breathe generously and in so doing calling to mind Vernell Fournier, the diplomatic and stately locomotive who made Jamal’s trios go. You’ll get where you’re going on time, with recalibrated focus and purpose.

“Ciao Bella” YouTube vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcF7q2v6voo&list=OLAK5uy_km3AuOuAyf6_rW7J_M_azdqOROOoLLZT0&index=10

But slow your roll. Don’t get greedy. New music can be a bridge over troubled water, but the really good stuff leaves you with humbling perspective. And the very best stuff leaves you in awe. The album’s closer, a Castelluzzo arrangement of Michel Legrand’s “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” won’t just cut you down to size; it will level you. Ballads are said to either expose a musician or reveal him. This one reveals Castelluzzo as a profound musical communicator. That, dear listeners, is how you close an album. And, as the CEO of this project, you’ve got to give Joyce a lot of credit for foregrounding a closing tour-de-force like this from the second chair. When there’s real trust and true friendship on the bandstand, you find mature, secure bandleaders stoked to let their sidemen shine like this.

“What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” YouTube vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVJmwh-E7vo&list=OLAK5uy_km3AuOuAyf6_rW7J_M_azdqOROOoLLZT0&index=11

The success of an idiomatically omnivorous album like this suggests that real changes are afoot in jazz. On the one hand, Almost Familiar is love letter to a lot of the classic bop-oriented stuff that Joyce and Castelluzzo revere. But also, it presents this love letter in contemporary clothing, along the way making a compelling case for the recording studio as a bona fide instrument in itself.

In deftly balancing nods to Joyce’s mentors and the foundations of his musical training, while also satisfying a desire to honestly communicate original ideas that, strictly speaking, might reside slightly outside or adjacent-to straight ahead jazz, Joyce’s sophomore recording as a leader is a triumph.

If you haven’t yet heard Almost Familiar—with Castelluzzo, Kornhauser, Sean Hicke, and several more of San Diego’s finest musicians as sidemen—you really must check it out. In eschewing prescriptive notions of what jazz must be, it, on nearly every cut, elegantly reveals jazz’s ostensibly discrete epochs to be mere checkpoints along an unbroken continuum.