The jazz supergroup of free-improvising heavyweights—Patrick Shiroishi, Jessica Ackerley, Chris Williams, Luke Stewart, and Jason Nazary—veers between frenetic roar and microscopic textures.
A primordial tempest of rhythm—delivered in the form of a tumbling wave of drums and a soaring guitar solo—introduces SSWAN, a jazz supergroup composed of a few of the brightest stars in the loose constellation of U.S.-based free improvisers. Its members—saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, guitarist Jessica Ackerley, trumpeter Chris Williams, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Jason Nazary—have collaborated in various capacities for quite some time. Shiroishi has recorded duo outings with three of the other members, and Nazary mixed Williams’ album Live earlier this year. On Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster, they harness their collective histories to deliver a gripping debut, building fantastic forms that capture each of their unique textural viewpoints.
The record’s title track serves as SSWAN’s slow-building roll call. Nazary and Ackerley’s opening duet absorbs Shiroishi effortlessly; his dense flurry of notes pairs up in dizzy harmony with the guitarist’s chordal slashing. Williams and Stewart enter together, then split apart. Williams winds out slowly, seasick and searching. Stewart bellows groaning punctuation. You can hear the accumulated years of understanding between the players kicking in as they disconnect and reassemble, each taking delicate care to preserve the others’ finely honed voices before the cacophony swells and dissipates, ending in a parabolic mirror image of the beginning. Nazary taps out shimmering cymbal splashes and Ackerley crawls gently over the fretboard.
The anxious thrill of the title track’s frayed attack settles into grounded stillness on “Pattern Phases.” The next scene in Invisibility’s triptych, it brings out each player’s well-documented capacity for tactile ambient sprawl. Taken at a simmer, SSWAN engage in a game of shadow puppetry at the acoustic limits of their instruments, leaving pitch by the wayside and painting with their timbral outlines. Saxophone and trumpet swirl with breath; pick-scraped guitar strings clang like a detuned telephone. One member—it’s impossible to tell who—drops their instrument entirely and offers up a hissing noise similar to one you’d use to lure in a wary cat. It's a spellbinding, adventurous 11 minutes that coaxes you ever deeper into your headphones.
The opener’s frenetic roar and the second track’s patient, near-electronic rebuttal document a group working to break out of their established sonic relationships by jamming in two distinct narrative modes: While they work steadily toward a blended identity, they frequently veer off into a series of fascinating side conversations.
The album’s closer, “A Miracle’s Worth,” parlays the experiments of the first two acts into a 17-minute exhale that buzzes with a spiritual hum. The last five minutes are a perfectly paced six-legged race toward the horizon. Stewart’s bowed bass grinds out a sturdy foundation, with Ackerley’s billowing chords boosting the horns and drums into spiraling ecstasy. Williams shines most of all, his flowing leads guiding the quintet onward like a battle cry. Recorded in 2020, Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster is a now-distant scratching of the surface from a quintet that has yet to reconvene, an anthropological dig preserved on the tantalizing cusp of a scientific breakthrough. As the sun sets on this first recording, the glow of their shared eureka moment burns bright.
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