Tomin – Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina
International Anthem
When he’s not playing horns of one kind or another in the adventurous jazz/hip-hop collective Standing on the Corner, 27-year-old Tomin makes a living as a bioinformatician, a profession that generally involves using computers to analyze genetic information. On his debut album, Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina, Tomin doesn’t employ sophisticated software, but he is parsing a massive, information-rich heritage.
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Recorded during the COVID lockdowns, nearly all of these 24 short pieces—most hover around a minute—are one-man interpretations of jazz greats, with Tomin playing various clarinets and cornet, accompanying himself via multi-tracking. It’s a consciously bare-bones endeavor (Tomin originally self-released these tracks over the span of a couple years), and he doesn’t try to recreate the improvisatory flair of a large band, instead sketching primary themes or motifs with two or three instruments and then moving on.
Tomin’s selection of material is eclectic without being unorthodox, including canonized composers such as Charles Mingus (the signature jaunt of “Fables of Faubus”) and Ellington via Eric Dolphy (the aching “Come Sunday,” which Tomin presents in two versions: one on bass clarinet, the other on soprano) alongside cult favorites like pianist Mal Waldron (“Fire Waltz” and “Warm Canto”) and saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk (“The Inflated Tear”), plus more obscure figures overdue for rediscovery like flautist Adele Sebastian (“Desert Fairy Princess”).
Though Tomin radically strips down these songs, he still manages to retain some of their rich mystery. He takes the most liberties with Coltrane’s “Naima,” transforming its serene melodic declaration into a nagging, harmonically troubled question, but elsewhere turns in a startlingly faithful version of Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre’s “Humility in the Light of the Creator”—the only track he renders pretty much in its entirety.
Tomin adopts a hesitantly deliberate tempo throughout, as if trying to decipher these songs or get to the bottom of them, but his reverence for the source material is palpable—this collection represents a spiritual exercise as much as a mental one. Curiously, the album ends with four Tomin originals on synth, minus the tactile grain of the previous material but still noticeably brief and ambiguous. If Tomin is studying the DNA of jazz, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what he’s learned. GRADE: B-
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