Album Notes

A knuckleball leaves a pitcher's fingertips, and what happens next is anybody's guess. Batters (and catchers) will tell you that what looks like a straightforward toss from the stands is a floating, dancing mystery, impossible to pin down. Its path is unpredictable; it is a hidebound enigma.

Peter Mulvey's “The Knuckleball Suite” begins abruptly, with a stray squall from a Telecaster, and hard on its heels a full-on New Orleans Second Line drumbeat. And then comes the voice, up close, arm around your shoulder, urgently whispering seeming non-sequiters into your ear, which you sense would add up were you given time to think.

But “Old Simon Stimson” (why is that name familiar?) is over in two and half minutes, and we're off. A country waltz for a war President becomes an invocation for peace; a titanic U2 rock anthem is recast as a conspiratorial Jazz whisper. Even the obligatory fastball across the plate has movement on it: a jangly pop tune about a young woman in a bar is somehow also a Tibetan Buddhist meditation on impermanence. A Tin-Pan Alley standard, complete with the classic “verse out front” invokes not a lover's smile but Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Macbeth, Samuel Beckett, Lyndon Johnson, and Edvard Munch's painting “The Scream.”

Nothing here is what it seems, and Mulvey stands at the center of this eclectic flurry, tossing things straight to you (right?), alternately poker-faced or grinning. He is joking. He is impassioned. He is bemusedly detached. He has no idea where this is headed. He means every single word.

The sheer breadth and depth of this collection speaks of the years this artist has spent avidly, joyfully honing his craft, soaking up the juju of masters past and present, and (like a knuckleballer) attending to details. File the fingernails. Practice the scales. Stretch the arm. Listen to Louis Armstrong and Latin Playboys. Learn ten Ellington tunes; twenty by Greg Brown. Call your friends and argue about art. Play. Play music on stage and off, day and night.

The “Suite” was recorded in two and a half days, with a cadre of world-class improvising musicians who had not rehearsed a single note of the songs together. It is not Jazz, but it is a Jazz approach. The years of study and refinement, theory and practice, are present, but are shrugged off at the doorstep of the studio. In there, it's rapport and intuition, spontanaeity and spark. What gets spoken is the barest essentials: “Tag it twice?”, “End on Four to One, yes?”. What is unspoken is every leap, listen, and turn. And what remains is usually Take Two, sometimes Take Three. Each track is a warm, large-format photograph of a gifted musical posse, caught in the very moment of Making It All Up. Out of thin air. For real.

That's Knuckleball Suite: now just try and pin it down.