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By Newsweek Editors
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The jazz trombonist Ray Anderson noticed some years back that when he sang at certain pitches, his voice split in two. His vocal cords produced one note, and the skin outside the larynx produced a second. The first is a cartoonish Satchmo styling; its shadow sounds like Satchmo through an aerosol can. Together, vying their way through a standard like Duke Ellington's "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," they're as queerly beautiful and weird a voice as you're likely to hear.
For Anderson, 38, the combination is just about right: a comic sideshow effect that walks the edge of heartbreak. It is silly and deeply affecting at the same time.
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This is a fair description of Anderson's music as a whole, including the new "Wishbone" album, which features one example of his singing. Raised on Dixieland jazz-he picked up the trombone when he was 8 after listening to his father's Dixieland records-and schooled in the avantgarde bands of Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul, Anderson pulls apart the music of his roots and puts it back together with a spirit of mischievous invention. "I never went in for the idea that music was linear," he says, "that Dixieland begat swing, and swing begat bop, and so on."
Anderson mashes the eras together, as his trombone skitters out on its own, chasing often sophisticated ideas with a giddy joy. He's an approachable face of the avantgarde, as rich in humor as in musical adventure.
J.L.
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