Matt Wilson Quartet - Hug! [WEB] (2020)

On 2020's Hug!, drummer Matt Wilson leads his ebullient, often irreverent pianoless quartet on what feels like a mission to get you to smile. An adventurous drummer with a playfully hard-swinging post-bop sensibility, Wilson has led various incarnations of his quartet since the '90s. Here, he reunites the same group that appeared on 2014's Gathering Call with pianist John Medeski, including cornetist Kirk Knuffke, saxophonist Jeff Lederer, and bassist Chris Lightcap. Both Lederer and Lightcap are longtime associates of Wilson's going back at least as far as 2009's That's Gonna Leave a Mark. Similarly, Knuffke has been a close collaborator since 2015, having played on several of the drummer's albums and in his Sifter trio with guitarist Mary Halvorson. All of which is to say that each musician brings a shared musical language to their work on Hug!, an eclectic album that casually evokes the joyously outr? work of artists like Ornette Coleman, Lester Bowie, and Sun Ra. The album kicks off with Gene Ammons' "The One Before This," a bluesy number delivered in a tipsy, shoot-from-the-hip style -- the kind of thing Dizzy Gillespie would play halfway through a concert of heady bebop, just to get the crowd clapping. From there, they dive headlong into Abdullah Ibrahim's South African-tinged "Jabulani" and Charlie Haden's brisk "In the Moment," both of which showcase the quartet's deeply intuitive grasp of Ornette Coleman's buoyant, harmolodic free jazz style. At the center of he album is the acerbic and satirical art collage "Space Force March/Interplanetary Music," in which Wilson sets President Donald Trump's speech announcing the creation of a U.S. Space Force to an off-kilter marching band anthem of skronky horns and skittering xylophones before launching into a cartoonishly sung Space Force theme song. Less broadly delivered is the drummer's agonizingly romantic ballad "Everyday with You," in which Knuffke and Lederer harmonize in spare, dusky tones. We also get a spritely rendition of Dewey Redman's "Joie de Vivre" and a sweetly attenuated take on Roger Miller's 1965 hit "King of the Road," the latter of which features chummy cornet and clarinet interplay between Knuffke and Lederer. Wilson also draws upon his childhood love of '60s pop elsewhere, as on his original "Sunny & Share," in which he pushes Sonny & Cher's "And the Beat Goes On" through a kaleidoscopic blender of Middle Eastern free jazz. Conversely, the title track is a shiny, foot-tapping anthem with string accents that brings to mind the feel-good AM instrumental pop of Herb Alpert. Enjoyably unpredictable, Hug! is an album full of risk-taking fun that dares you to embrace it.