Alto saxophonist Alison Shearer had nearly completed her debut solo album when her father, acclaimed photojournalist John Shearer, died in 2019. In the aftermath, the Brooklyn-based musician, who cofounded the ten-piece hip hop group Pitchblak Brass Band and currently plays with eclectic party band Red Baraat, decided to start from scratch. Her new View From Above doesn’t address John’s death or Alison’s grief directly, though it nods to John’s work in the civil rights movement with “Big Sides,” a gospel-tinged protest against police violence. Instead, the bulk of the material, as the album title suggests, lifts and swoops away from specifics, with bright melancholy and nostalgia circling about each other somewhere in the region of the clouds. Like fellow saxophonist Kamasi Washington, Shearer mixes funk and soul into her jazz, but she focuses on a lighter side of fusion—the kind pioneered by Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. The intricately angular postbop sax in the intro to “Celestial” puts you in a nimble spaceship, but its zigs and zags are cushioned by Horace Phillips’s gentle, solid drums and Kevin Bernstein’s fluid, melodic piano. “Dawn to Dusk,” with its influences from Eastern scales and gritty soul-jazz bottom, may be the album’s most aggressive-sounding track; “Purple Flowers,” by contrast, with Hattie Simon’s honey-sweet vocals spinning around Shearer’s honey-sweet tone, borders on neosoul dream pop. Shearer never ventures into avant-garde territory, but her songwriting is too complex and eclectic to fit comfortably into smooth jazz. View From Above is comforting, celebratory, and upbeat without being glib. At a time when loss is pervasive and hope is hard to come by, it’s worth listening to someone who has grappled with the first and managed to hang on to the second.
Alison Shearer’s View From Above drops 2/18 and is available for pre-order on Bandcamp.
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