Trumpeter and composer Ralph Alessi cuts a distinctive figure in contemporary jazz, with a remarkable ability to use the same tools as most – acoustic instrumentation, quartet and quintet formations, bop vocabulary – and still come up with something that sounds like no one else.
A Sun That Never Set, his fifth album as a leader for ECM, bears this out. Fronting a fivesome made of friends and family, including his brother Joseph on trombone, Matt Mitchell on piano, John Hébert on bass, and Ches Smith on drums and percussion, Alessi carefully and calmly sculpts environments that feel like a singularity in the middle of post bop, chamber jazz, and some sort of sonic language unique to the leader himself. Despite, or, rather, encouraged by the craft with…