“Improbable connections are made and things happen when you least expect them to.”
Storied Bay Area saxophonist Rent Romus’ new experimental jazz ensemble Actual/Actual boasts incredible musicianship, expressing a delightful effervescence, whimsicality, and versatility. Traversing the bounds of swing, Latin music, fusion, doom rock, reggae, and punk with “a blues music orientation,” the group’s debut album Baptismal demonstrates that genres are really quite fluid. Spectral moments surface throughout as a bit of other-worldliness emerging from brassy cacophony. Raucous, delicately haunting, and most definitely coy, the album has a kind of nonchalant majesty to it. Punk rock, indeed.
