Branford Marsalis Quartet
Eternal

Balance.

This album is a gravitational miracle, suspended in space and damnably stable, weightless, like a celestial body. It draws ethereal, very refined plots, but never hostile: the quartet's tales are of the highest kind of pop music, catchy to the point of spasm. Music.
The repertoire is luxurious, ennobled by higher-class standards, the Evans-like "The Ruby And The Pearl", or "Gloomy Sunday", the suicide song par excellence, made famous by Billie Holiday, here sublimated. The ecumenism that pervades the work is consolidated by an equal contribution to the original repertoire, one track per member.

"Eternal" envelops everything, there is no room for egotism, the four never transcend the supreme sense of the jazz ballad, blending their respective breath into a mysterious harmony. Undeniable is the primacy of Marsalis' sax, the narrative voice, the thread that runs through everything, the superb chisel. Superb without being overbearing, and thus Joey Calderazzo can narrate with heartrending piano phrases, while Eric Revis and Jeff Watts, elsewhere much harsher with percussion, weave a rhythmic arrangement that is a spider web crossed by the sun, up high. The spatial suspension is realized through time, an expanded and natural time, to which every sound is devoted.

"Eternal" is the translation into notes of the Vitruvian Man, balanced in a square and yet circular equilibrium, and it is humankind, in a broad sense, that benefits from one of the highest jazz episodes of recent years.