Francis Davis of The Village Voice reviews These Are The Words!

“Lugerner has said that the seven pieces on These Are the Words (where he’s joined by pianist Myra Melford, drummer Matt Wilson, and Bay Area trumpeter Darren Johnston, all better known than he) are based on verses from the Torah and draw their "intervallic relationships … time signatures, and tempo markings,” as well as their melodies, harmonies, and improvisational gambits, from his application of an ancient practice known as Gematria, “a method favored by medieval Kabbalists” involving assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters. I hope being told this doesn’t give the impression that Lugerner’s music is arcane and emotionally impenetrable, because nothing could be further from the truth. Composers all seem beholden to their own idiosyncratic methodology these days, for which we probably have Arnold Schoenberg and Joseph Schillinger to blame. What counts is how the results fall on the ear, and in Lugerner’s case, this means a textured, nearly seamless blend of composition and improvisation of the sort that die-hard jazzists might complain is really modern chamber music—a distinction that ought to be so much water under the bridge in light of the past 30 years. Though Lugerner cites Steve Reich's Tehillimas an inspiration behind These Are the Words, Reich’s direct influence is discernable only in the cyclical piano figures that set the closing “The Evening Episode” in motion, and not to an extent likely to strike anyone as derivative. Part of what impressed Lugerner about Tehillim, he says, was Reich’s restraint in setting Hebrew psalms to music that isn’t expressly Jewish. Minus voices and more abstractly, These Are the Words achieves something very similar; Johnston unfurls a few cantorial inflections during his masterful solo on “Sustenance,” but the piece itself is more like one of Ornette Coleman’s tempo-less dirges than anything identifiably Hebraic. Where Lugerner does resemble Reich (and Philip Glass, for that matter) is in expressing weighty ideas via means associated with minimalism—specifically, pivoting motion against stasis, a strategy for which jazz precedents date back to Anthony Davis’s gamelan-influenced pieces of the early 1980s, to say nothing of Monk. On “In the Wilderness"—equal parts piano concerto and (one surmises) evocation of 40 years wandering the desert—this takes the form of Melford and Wilson improvising freely over and around a repeated, rising-and-falling phrase played by trumpet and bass clarinet voiced an interval apart. Lugerner here and elsewhere achieves orchestral color by assigning his horn and Johnston’s a role usually given to bass, and along with the free rein he allows his fellow improvisers (the wonderful Melford, in particular), pieces that might have sounded rigid and schematic come across as spontaneous and engaging.

In his own infrequent solos here, Lugerner makes even less of an impression than on Narratives. But his bass clarinet adds plenty of tug to the ensembles and duets, and soloing doesn’t seem to be what he’s about anyway. He figures to make his mark as a composer, and he’s off to a great start.”

-Francis Davis (The Village Voice) - Click here for full article