On Someone to Someone, the powerhouse new album from Jon Irabagon, the kaleidoscopic saxophonist revisits his past in a tale of two cities—New York, where he rose to prominence, and Chicago, where he simply rose.
Fresh on the heels of Server Farm, his complexly constructed nonet album incorporating electronics and the large-language modality of A.I., Irabagon unveils this stripped-down, all-acoustic quartet. Starring three exceptionally versatile Midwest musicians—trumpeter Russ Johnson, bassist Clarke Sommers, and drummer Dana Hall—the band he calls PlainsPeak offers six compositions that illustrate the saxophonist’s renewed relationship with Chicago and its environs (where he grew up and currently resides).
This new band represents not one but two full-circle moments for the endlessly inventive, perpetually curious Irabagon. First, it reunites him with Johnson, who played on the saxophonist’s debut album, Jon Irabagon’s Outright! in 2008. As he was completing studies at Juilliard in New York, Irabagon realized, “I needed to play with people who had more experience on the scene,” and he began informal weekly sessions with Johnson and pianist Kris Davis. Johnson took a teaching job in Wisconsin in the 2010s and quickly made his mark in the fervid improvised music community of Chicago, about an hour away. “When I decided to move back to Chicago, I knew I wanted to reconnect,” says Irabagon.
Closed circle #2: Irabagon’s ties to Sommers go back to the early 1990s, when the bassist played on the high-school saxophonist’s very first public performance. “So I’ve known Clark for my whole professional career,” he marvels. Sommers’ longtime rhythm partner, the volcanic drummer Dana Hall, was a graduate assistant during Irabagon’s undergrad years at DePaul University in Chicago; Irabagon had no classes with Hall but heard him during rehearsals and immediately knew he’d play with him someday. “This band was meant to be,” he says.
The name PlainsPeak stays true to Irabagon’s layered personality and penchant for wordplay. On one hand, it pays heed to his then-and-again home: “Vis-à-vis the coasts, we’re the one in the middle. Chicago is the ‘peak’ of the Great Plains.” But when read quickly, it becomes “plain speak,” as good a description as any for the unadorned sound of this basic, two-horn quartet—the first Chicago band under his own name, and a testament to the limitless possibilities of this format. Irabagon foregoes the other instruments at his disposal—ranging from the cumbersome bass sax all the way to the rare mezzo-soprano to the hummingbird-tweeting soprillo—to focus on the alto, his first horn. “I originally planned be on tenor, because of Chicago’s great lineage of tenor players. But I played alto on that first album with Russ, and that won out.”
Nonetheless, the city imbues each of the compositions on PlainsPeak. “This record reflects everything that I love about Chicago, and Chicago music, from straight-ahead to the avant-garde,” Irabagon explains. It helps that all four artists are superb “inside-outside” players, equally at home in the post-bop mainstream or avant-garde floodwaters.
The title track immediately shines the spotlight on Sommers and Hall, whose hand-in-glove interaction has led dozens of Chicago jazz ensembles to hire them as a paired entry. A bittersweet theme brackets an arco bass solo; a superheated drum break follows then introduces a free section of inspired blowing before the theme returns. “So there are these chorale moments before the bass steps out,” says Irabagon. “It’s basically a love song about my family. In a group, like in a family, members have responsibility to the others but also to themselves.”
“Buggin’ the Bug,” Irabagon’s version of a blues march, is an older piece that he had employed in other bands. “But when the cicada invasion happened last summer in the Midwest, I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Here we go!’” It really shows what Clark and Dana can do, which makes them the ‘A-team” for any kind of straight-ahead music in Chicago. I haven’t heard enough of them going wild, though. For this tune, I wanted the shuffle-beat but I also wanted the uninhibited thing to come through.”
Chicago is home to Jeppsen’s Malört, a locally produced, wormwood-flavored liqueur once described as tasting “like a baby aspirin wrapped in a grapefruit peel, bound with rubber bands and then soaked in well gin”—by a guy who then became the brand’s marketing director. It’s also the unofficial quaff at The Green Mill, Chicago’s fabled northside jazz club, where shots of the stuff are a rite of passage for newbies. So it’s only natural that punster Irabagon would title his hymn-like ballad “Malört Is My Shepherd.” The quasi-religious invocations give way to some of the hardest blowing on the disc.
Chicago’s famous pizza inspired “At What Price Garlic,” a loping, deceptively easygoing theme built on a vamp; the catch is that the vamp shifts. At various points, it’s in 11/4 time, 3/4, 5/4, or 9 beats to the bar. “Each player gets to solo in his own meter,” notes Irabagon; “it’s the most labyrinthine of all these tunes. It’s like a deep-dish pizza because it has all those layers.”
Irabagon turns reflective on “Tiny Miracles,” a song he describes as “an amalgamation of sad things—but good things, too. When the Cubs won the World Series in 2016 [their first championship in 108 years] I read all these stories about fans who lived until two days after the Series, or this guy who drove 800 miles to his father’s cemetery, with an old radio, to listen to the last game.” The accumulation of baseball heartbreak, intermingled with memories of a recently deceased friend, colored this composition and the performance. On a lighter note, the album closes with “The Pulseman,” a grandly energetic piece dedicated, says Irabagon, to drummer Hall “and his ability to move in and out of stuff, and to drive the bus—and to drummers throughout Chicago and everywhere.”
The son of Filipino immigrants, Jon Irabagon grew up in the Chicago suburbs and received his B.M. in music from DePaul University. Armed with post-graduate degrees from Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard, in 2008 he won the Thelonious Monk Saxophone Competition, the first of a long and growing list of awards and honors that include DownBeat “Rising Star” awards (on both alto and tenor saxophones) and the Philippine Presidential Award, the highest civilian honor available to an overseas Filipino. Over the next dozen years he established himself as one of New York’s “25 Jazz Icons” (Time Out New York) through his work in bands led by Dave Douglas, Mary Halvorson, legendary drummer Barry Altschul, and Ralph Alessi, and as a founding member of the provocative ensemble Mostly Other People do the Killing.
In early 2021, with a budding family and the desire to be closer to his parents, he returned to the Chicago area. He soon invested himself in the city’s improvised music community, while retaining the collaborative relationships he’d nurtured in New York with such artists as Halvorson and his “go-to” rhythm section of Matt Mitchell, Chris Lightcap, and Dan Weiss. Irabagon also founded and runs his own imprint, Irabbagast Records, where he releases his own works as well as those of other cutting-edge artists.
As for that label name, Irabagon explains: “When I started the label, I was going to Norway a lot to perform. I made a lot of friends there, and I got this nickname, ‘Rabbagast,’ which I combined with the first letters of my last name.” His Norse friends chose the sobriquet wisely. A rabbagast, per the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia, is “a bold, reckless, and mischievous individual—a bit of a wild spirit.” The word comes from a character in French theater; Norwegians adapted it to describe “someone who is fearless, cheeky, and carefree.”
It’s hard to imagine a better avatar for Irabagon’s puckish personality or his playful, daring music—which, in rejecting convention, has coalesced into a stirring and eclectic body of work.
