Gilad Hekselman, This Just In, Jazz Village (Harmonia Mundi). Gilad Hekselman, guitar, synth,glockenspiel, Joe Martin bass, Marcus Gilmore, drums saxophonist Mark Turner guest tenor sax.
After three successful albums, This Just In is guitarist Hekselman’s fourth, and likely to go good. Most of the 13 tunes are his own. Hekselman’s guitar lines float like translucent filaments fingering their way in liquid space. He can wail like a sax or with a sax in“Newsflash, Pt. 1. ” Newsflash, Pt. 2” is spacey with a little tweedle here, some toodle there and a bit of boom: the whistling, squeak and twitter of everybody finding there own way to the groove. It like it that “Ghost of the North is very sweet. Hekselman’s guitar sort of noses around whimpering changes that are melody-based rather than abstract chord-based, though sometimes, as in “Eye in the Sky,” he gets caught up in a mimimalist phrase loop. Joe Martin’s percussion I like for being less thud and boom, more crackle and especially splash of cymbal. Riffing with Mark Turner’s sax on “Nothing Personal,” Hekselman’s playing is very fine. You can hear the music is coming out of him. It makes you want to move, not just around, but to stretch and extend yourself into the quirky.