It began simply enough. “I wanted to make a jazz trombone record,” Jacob Garchik says, explaining his decision to embark on the challenging, entertaining tour de force that is his new album, Assembly (Yestereve).
In February 2021 Garchik convened a quintet—soprano-saxophone extended-techniques master Sam Newsome, pianist Jacob Sacks, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Dan Weiss—in a Brooklyn studio to blow for several hours on a blend of blues, rhythm changes, freebop lines, and standards. For the next three months, Garchik worked with the tapes in his own basement studio, reconfiguring raw materials into palimpsestic compositions. Then, in May, the band reassembled to record those post-production creations. On the album-opening “Collage,” Garchik had overlapped two collectively improvised versions of rhythm changes at different tempos and wrote a new melody to go over it. On “Bricolage,” he looped Morgan’s bass into motifs over which Newsome improvises. On “Idée Fixe,” he froze Sacks’ repeated phrase during a solo on yet another set of rhythm changes and looped it into a scratched-LP effect as a backdrop for several improvised episodes.
Garchik is no stranger to complexity. Assembly directly follows 2020’s Clear Line, for which he conducted a virtuoso 13-piece reeds-and-brass big band, sans rhythm section, through a suite of gnarly yet melodic, primarily through-composed charts. Preceding Clear Line was 2015’s Ye Olde, a prog rock-inflected portrayal of an imagined medieval Brooklyn architectural landscape on which his trombone sings over three electric guitars and flamboyant drums. Ye Olde followed 2012’s The Heavens, where Garchik overdubs eight trombones, two baritone horns, two sousaphones, and tuba in various configurations on songs refracting the “God’s Trombones” component of African American gospel vernaculars.
“I started working on in 2017, and it took a few years to put together,” Garchik continues. He enumerates the varied jobs he’s taken over the past decade to cover the mortgage on the two-story house in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights where he lives with his wife,, a late-Beethoven treatment of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a sampled Pete Seeger celebration called “Storyteller,” pieces featuring a Tuvan throat singer and a Malian vocal trio, Vietnamese opera vignettes, Górecki’s , and homages to Mahalia Jackson (“Precious Lord Take My Hand”), the Who (“Baba O’Riley”), and Jimi Hendrix taking on Bob Dylan (“All Along the Watchtower”).
