PRE-SALE “In The Garden” – Alison Shearer – Vinyl

Most Western music—and a lot of non-Western music, too—is rhythmically organized into groups of two, three, or four beats each. You get one strong beat and a couple of weaker ones to follow it and your body understands intuitively how to respond. Start messing with fives and sevens and elevens and so forth and you’re into trickier territory. The gravitational simplicity of the smaller numbers is so strong that five is easily pulled into three and two; seven into four and three. You’re constantly switching between two different possibilities for the way the music could feel, like a room whose color quietly shifts each time you walk in anew. It can be difficult to get into a flow, because it keeps getting interrupted as soon as it begins. 

In the Garden is not like that. The second album from composer and multi-reed player Alison Shearer is filled with the sorts of rhythms that would make less accomplished musicians lose their steps. But Shearer plays and orchestrates them with such grace that they feel as natural as mountain streams, meandering briskly along pathways that are as unpredictable as they are inevitable, catching glints of spring sunlight along the way. She and her quartet—keyboardist Kevin Bernstein, drummer Horace Phillips, bassist Marty Kenney, and Shearer on alto and soprano saxes and flute—make her richly complex originals sound jubilantly simple. One can imagine a fellow virtuoso musician poring over their intricacies or a small child shouting and dancing along. The grooves are funky and alive. The melodies arrive in bold, bright strokes. 

Shearer’s sophistication as a composer extends beyond her deftness with difficult meters. Each of these 10 tunes is a journey, eschewing straightforward head-and-solos form in favor of dramatic scene-setting and narrative expressed through arrangement. Like the bustle of polyrhythmic handclaps that breaks out midway through “Liberty Market,” giving exuberant release to the tune’s already buoyantly social mood, or the brief and atmospheric solo electric bass showcase “I,” whose crystalline natural harmonics and aqueous pitch-shifting effects serve as an impressionistic cold opening for the haunting title track. Even the standard “Skylark,” the only non-Shearer composition, is radically reimagined, with a single-note piano line and hi-hat pattern clicking away like Morse code, and Shearer’s joyous reading of the melody interpreting their messages as mysterious nonverbal language. 

The band’s fluency with electronic as well as acoustic instrumentation brings the music into lively conversation with the present moment. Iridescent gobs of synth bass hold down the staccato sax refrain of “Homer.” Psychedelic layers of flute are overdubbed on “II,” coming together and diverging, multiple timelines in uneasy coexistence. Thanks to these touches of electronics and Shearer’s ceaseless rhythmic inventions, In the Garden feels at once like a great lost jazz fusion album of the late ’70s and like a dispatch that could have only been transmitted in 2025. 

For Shearer, rhythm can be a way of evoking a memory, of a place, a person, a feeling, elucidating something essential about her experience that can’t be captured in words. Perhaps this is one reason for the sense of unhurried ease that pervades this music, which—it’s worth reiterating—must be relentlessly difficult to perform. Its complexity is not a technical exercise, but a sincere attempt to render the myriad colors and textures of a life. A bar of seven to convey the melancholy that hovers at the margins of an otherwise peaceful afternoon; a hypnotic ostinato that seems to shift and grow even as it stays the same, mirroring a sense of self that is both steady and infinitely varied. This curiosity and close observation is also evident in Shearer’s virtuosic improvising, the way a single sustained note expresses multitudes of feeling and consideration as thoroughly as a mazelike run up and down her instrument’s range

Life itself rarely unfolds in 4/4: there are always digressions, asides, complications that don’t fit so easily into the boxes with which we try to contain and understand them. But as we navigate its unruly contours, we find stories to guide us, of love and loss, joy and sorrow, feelings as clear and as sing-song refrains. In the Garden holds these contradictions with rare confidence, without attempting to force them into resolution: complexity and simplicity, chaos and form, piercing intellect and deep feeling.