Burning Ambulance

by Phil Freeman

Marcus Strickland is a saxophonist whose seventh album, Triumph of the Heavy Vol. 1 & 2, comes out tomorrow. His first two albums, 2001′s At Last and 2002′s Brotherhood, were released on Fresh Sound; 2009′s Of Song, a collection of standards, was on Criss Cross. But the bulk of his discography—2006′s Twi-Life (a double-disc set documenting two very different bands), 2007′s Open Reel Deck, 2009′s Idiosyncrasies and now Triumph of the Heavy—has been on his own Strick Muzik label.

Strickland’s music is self-contained in another important way. He’s a twin, and his brother E.J. is his drummer—or, at any rate, the two men are musical partners. They work separately, of course; E.J. also drums for Ravi Coltrane, while Marcus was a member of Roy Haynes‘s band for five years and has also worked steadily with Jeff “Tain” Watts‘s group and Dave Douglas‘s Keystone.

Triumph of the Heavy is divided into a live disc and a studio disc. The studio recordings feature a quartet: Marcus on soprano, alto and tenor saxophones and clarinets, David Bryant on piano, Ben Williams on bass and E.J. Strickland on drums. The live disc, recorded in May 2010 at Firehouse 12, features everyone but Bryant, and Marcus limits himself to soprano and tenor saxophones.

The group’s music has a strong sense of swing, but a powerful, polyrhythmic groove emerges quite often, too. This is something Strickland has explored on earlier albums in more depth—the group heard on the second disc of Twi-Life featured guitarist Lage Lund and electric bassist Brad Jones alongside the brothers, while Open Reel Deck swapped those two out for Mike Moreno and Carlos Henderson, respectively, while adding trumpet from Keyon Harrold and spoken-word segments from a poet going simply by Malachi. Even in an all-acoustic format, though, the saxophonist and his brother bring the funk. Idiosyncrasies, while recorded with the Strickland-Strickland-Williams trio, included versions of songs by Björk, Andre 3000 and Stevie Wonder, and E.J. Strickland breaks the music on Triumph of the Heavy‘s “Mudbone” down to a taut, almost Meters-esque shuffle. This same discipline is heard in Marcus Strickland’s playing. Unlike many contemporary players, his lines never seem to wander. They have a starting point and a resolution, and a coherence in between that displays a stark unwillingness to waste his breath or the audience’s time. In this, and given his extremely humanistic, almost crying tone, especially on the soprano (an instrument I almost always loathe, but not in his hands) and the clarinet, he’s strongly, and pleasingly, reminiscent of Eric Dolphy.