My review of Joe Locke's Love is a Pendulum, today All About Jazz.

Since signing with Motėma Music a couple years back, vibraphonist Joe Locke has been releasing some of the best and most diverse music in a career now entering its fourth decade. Form the near-fusion energy of 2012's Signing--the long overdue studio followup to the Joe Locke / Geoffrey Keezer group's incendiary Live in Seattle (Origin, 2006)--to the expansive beauty of his 2013 quartet collaboration with Lincoln, Nebraska's Symphony Orchestra on Wish Upon a Star and, just few months later the same year, an exploration of two musical forms that have been of seminal importance to the vibraphonist, Lay Down My Heart - Blues & Ballads Vol 1, Locke has been afforded virtual carte blanche to look forward and, perhaps for the first time in his career, plan out a series of recordings that demonstrate the depth and breadth of a vibraphonist who has, slowly but surely, emerged as one of the finest--if not the finest--of his generation.

Words have always meant a lot to Locke, even when the majority of his music is instrumental; poetry and literature are regular pastimes for the vibraphonist, and so it's no surprise to see that the central core of Love is a Pendulum is inspired by multi-dimensional artist Barbara Sfraga's poem of the same name. Bookended by "Variation On Wisdom"--a relatively brief, through-composed album opener that, in its innate marriage of challenging complexity and irrepressible lyricism, is the perfect set-up for the five-part, 44-minute "Love is a Pendulum" suite that follows--and three closing tracks that include the fiery "Last Ditch Wisdom," from which the opening "Variation" is drawn, Love is a Pendulum is Locke's first album in many years to be based around a core quartet augmented by a number of guests including saxophonists Rosario Giuliani and Donny McCaslin, vocalist Theo Bleckmann, guitarist Paul Bollenback (last heard with Locke on the triptych of albums for the now-defunct Sirocco Jazz label, beginning with 2001's Beauty Burning and concluding with 2002's State of Soul) and steel pan player Vincent Provost.

Love is a Pendulum is, in fact, Locke's first album since State of Soul to feature an expanded lineup to any significant degree (2008's Force of Four (Origin) featured a couple of guests, but only on a couple of tracks), and the first since his wonderful but short-lived Four Walls of Freedom group last heard on Dear Life (Sirocco, 2004) to feature the vibraphonist with horns in any significant way. The addition of Giuliani on six of Love is a Pendulum's nine tracks is key to the record's success, as is Locke's recruitment of the equally redoubtable McCaslin on two of those compositions and, on the "Love is a Pendulum" suite's closing movement "Love is Perpetual Motion," the addition of Provost, turning Locke's quartet into a sophisticated septet with plenty of potential and creating, in its astute blending of vibes and steel pans, an appealing textural palette new to Locke and one which certainly warrants further exploration.

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