Randy Trubitt is a Chicagoan sax and electronics player, composer, mixing engineer, and board member of the local Signbearer Records. He leads his own quartet that features guitarist Mike McCarthy, bassist Jack Sundstrom, and drummer Matt Riggen. The aptly titled (Peace Is Not) An Awful Lot To Ask is the Trubitt Quartet’s debut album, and is released on the United States ‘ 25oth anniversary, and is unmistakably shaped by its time.
Trubitt says that this album was not supposed to be as topical as it has become. Still, it was created amid a global climate crisis marked by rising authoritarianism, unjust wars in the Middle East, brutal police work, and renewed warhawk rhetoric. Therefore, (Peace Is Not) An Awful Lot To Ask offers a protest and a proposition: that resistance is not only necessary, but possible. It is a call to reject complacency and confront the forces that threaten collective freedom.
The album begins with a nervous, noisy musique concrète adaptation of David Crosby’s protest song «What Are Their Names» matched with Riggen’s «Living the Dream». These songs capture the album’s spirit: a pervasive sense of existential unease, but insisting that authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor permanent, and that speaking truth to power remains a vital act. Sundstrom’s protest song «Stop the War Machine» is reimagined as an instrumental, free, soulful reggae-tinged piece, cementing the inclusive approach of Trubitt Quartet. Trubitt’s haunting, bluesy but fusion-charged «PTW» was inspired by Olivier Messiaen’s famous Quatuor de la fin du Temps (The Quartet for the End of Time) and Kurt Vonnegut’s influential book Slaughterhouse 5 and challenges militarism and imperial violence. Riggen’s mourning «Held Down and Shot on the Surface of the Moon» was written shortly after Alex Pretti’s murder in Minneapolis by United States Customs and Border Protection officers.
Trubitt’s «Machine Machine Gun Gun» has a title that refers to Peter Brötzmann’s iconic, explosive free jazz album, but employs an infectious bluesy riff, and slow-cooks it towards a free jazz eruption. The painful, intense «Kaddish» (the Jewish mourner’s prayer) was written by Trubitt when he realized that he could not fall back on the comfort of faith to soften his grief. This impressive album ends with Woody Guthrie’s anthem «All You Fascists Bound to Lose», with the quartet singing the song and adding a motivating, swinging pulse, wishing to kick away the current geriatric fascist from the White House, as well as his other populist clones.
Eyal Hareuveni
Randy Trubitt (tenor saxophone, electronics), Mike McCarthy (guitar), Jack Sundstrom (bass), Spencer Peterson (drums)
