After years of playing with a roster of musicians and band leaders ranging from Makaya McCraven to Jeff Parker to Meshell Ndegeocello (whose most recent Grammy-winning album, The Omnichord Real Book, he produced), musician, composer, and arranger Josh Johnson wrote that he felt it was time to step sideways and explore some of his own compositional ideas. The result of his solo sojourn is Unusual Object, an idiosyncratic album brimming with fresh approaches, relentless curiosity, and – holding everything together like brightly colored thread – the understated virtuosity of his playing.
Aside from a few audio samples on the track “Telling You,” Johnson has set himself up as the sole source of every sound on UO. But in listening to the album, its nimble saxophone work, its warm, emotive, melodic changes, its pleasing surprises, it quickly becomes apparent that Johnson is no repressed frontman who’s been toiling in the shadows of others for too long and is thrilled to finally hog the spotlight. On track after track, his saxophone is equitably mixed with his myriad synth sounds, resulting in something unified and organic that speaks to his abilities to listen and collaborate, even with himself. Johnson’s vision is focused on the music, not the artist that the music originates from.
“Marvis,” the album’s longest track, at a brisk seven minutes, opens with a muffled 4/4 beat before Johnson comes in harmonizing his sax with synths while playing a laidback, labyrinthine melodic line that he playfully pushes ahead or holds behind that beat. Here and throughout the album, Johnson’s playing is light and sure, skillful without being showy. As the track progresses, the main melody gradually falls back, the song shifts to a cycle of rising and falling notes, and Johnson opens up and lets himself fly before it all comes to an abrupt stop.
Once it settles in, “Quince” creates a mesmerizing sonic moiré pattern of softly textured, shuffling beats that shift and slide under Johnson’s spare rhythmic motifs and upper register, staccato soloing before the track rises and fades on soaring pads. The album’s outlier – and surely something that should be set to some kind of choreography – is “Sterling,” a wildly dynamic, lunging, explosive creature composed of clipped polyrhythms and clashing textures that opens halfway to a languid interlude of twisted and entwined sax lines that soothe and guide the track to a close.
At least half of the tracks on UO clock in under three minutes, but they arrive fully formed and beat free. The opening track, “Who Happens If,” is sun-kissed and ethereal, the sound of early morning bird calls. “Deep Dark” is tentative and shy, a question asked in repeated, ascending notes hovering over lush pads. “Reddish” features Johnson and his sax, no synths, in a circular conversation of rippling phrases that he repeats with subtle nuances each time until it’s reborn yet somehow the same.
The album closes with a cover of Mal Waldron’s stunning cri de coeur, “All Alone,” taken from Waldron’s first solo album of the same name, recorded in 1966, three years after he’d nearly died from an overdose. Where Waldron’s original is both anguished and bitter, its somber surface continually worried by silent-movie-style, upper register trills and tremolos, and its low-end perforated by dagger-like chords, Johnson plies a middle route instead that pays keen homage while forging its own identity. Waldron’s submerged waltz timing is set up by Johnson in a muted percussive arpeggio while a stately church organ riding on it sets a contrasting tone. Johnson enters at a funereal pace, appropriately elegiac, but allows himself room to dig in and blow as he goes, pushing hard and pulling back, riding the feeling in the sweet spot of control and release until the song fades to black. It’s the most powerfully emotive track on UO and the perfect closer to the overdue debut of a musician ready to come into his own. (Damian Van Denburgh)