FunTime 2025
The Summit
Wisconsin wanderers get back on track to wonder whether the world changed since their last sonic travels.
With none other than Victor Wooten volunteering not only to join this duo onstage once in a while but also to provide their album with a cover photo, any music lover would feel obliged to pay attention to Connie Grauer and Kim Zick’s highly original material. In any case, there aren’t many two-lady jazz units who seek the validity of existence over the course of more than thirty years and who seemed to have located it like the pair of Milwaukeeans did on "Truth" seven years before “The Summit” found them still trying to figure out what happened to us all in the interim. Dealing with Covid and losing their mothers to Alzheimer’s could derail lesser mortals, yet global and personal tragedies strengthened the lifelong friends’ resolve to stay fierce in terms of creativity – and, despite everything, remain delicate.
From the view-from-a-distance anxiety of opener “Asteroid 1994” onwards, to where the titular number staggers first into hazy blues and then into pellucid, piano-propelled fusion, Kim and Connie engage their audience in a groovy shuffle through a stunning variety of moods which is often relentless. With the former’s nuanced drums locking with the latter’s thunderous bass and ethereal synthesizers, even the dramatic “Pandemic” – that floats into focus on the sounds of tweeting birds until Grauer’s effects-stricken stanzas cut across Zick’s polyrhythmic assault on silence – sheds its gloom. So when the jovial, cymbals-flaunting “Zoila The Magnificent” paints a portrait of a cat in softer, yet dynamically defiant, colors, the emotional scales tip in a few different ways; and if the elegiac, sparsely paced “Memory Hoops” crawls much deeper under the listener’s skin, “The Haunting” – improvised in the studio to capture the duo’s affinity for immediacy – offers loose menace to enrich the players’ palette of bottled sentiments.
However, it’s the sprawling, finely detailed “The Jury” that allows the little ensemble to eventually flex their melodic muscle as performers par excellence and to shift the momentum from tempo to tune and back again, and sets the scene for “Indispensable Feeling” to expose the dames’ embrace of darkness in a sublime, faux-old-timey ballad, a proper song, sad and beautiful. A cathartic album, “The Summit” is a cache of precious revelations.
*****
