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  Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

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  Includes unlimited streaming of Happy Jazz via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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• Digital Album

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  Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
  
  Happy Jazz gathers the results of a studio gig in the fall of last year, but in usual Relative Pitch fashion additional details are few and ultimately secondary to the deliberate and distinctive nearly 80-minutes of music-making on offer.
  The album title isn’t exactly an intuitive appellation describing the structured sounds the three players conjure together, but it does seem a fair summation of their shared mood from moment to moment in each other’s company. As with the scant annotative information, track titles do little to reveal their specific connections to associative music. The title piece is rife with directional shifts and spontaneous stops. Ruff brings a prickly and frequently brittle feel to his string manipulations with pedal manipulations that in some respects distantly echo Derek Bailey while Roder avoids reticence in using his rosined bow as a sharpened and at times merciless weapon on his strings. Mahall responds with sustained, sometimes piercing asides.
  Briefest of the numbers, “Dixie 1980” trades in billowy clusters of overlapping tones. Ruff and Roder cover the bottom end with flinty scrabbles and scrapes as Mahall floats above blowing delicate staccato shapes. “Happy Dogs” is of a similar stripe, at least surface-wise with a steady assemblage of information funneling from the players at varying degrees of register elevation. Ruff dials in some wobbly reverb to further confuse and conflate the intersecting trajectories. Across the program the emphasis appears on the journey rather than the dénouement or destination with the three players allowing themselves the luxury to roam and forage freely in the pursuit of concordant and discordant patterns. The signifiers of “Happy” and “Jazz” may be highly debatable in this context, but the fun resultant most certainly is not. - Derek Taylor ... more
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