from Lucid Culture
February 7, 2012 Posted by delarue

"What’s Up with Ask the Oracle"
Ask the Oracle is a deliciously uncategorizable album. Is it world music? Maybe. Free jazz? Some of it, definitely. It’s the brainchild of alto sax player Andy Haas, who thirty years after he played the iconic sax break on Martha & the Muffins’ Echo Beach, returned to Toronto to join forces with some of his old hometown’s new-ish improvisational talent. Besides Haas (who also plays flute and the Korean hojok reed instrument), the crew includes Colin Fisher on guitar, guzheng, tanbour and tenor sax, Aaron Lumley on bass, Brandon Valdivia on percussion, mbira and dzavadzimu, and Matthew “Doc” Dunn on drums. What does it sound like? You have to take this one track by track.

The first cut, Surfing to Canada, reminds of Peter Buck’s Tuatara project, but more corrosive. Over a gently clattering no wave shuffle beat, Fisher fires off screaming, tremolo-picked guitar in the distance against Haas’ calmly scrambling atmospherics that eventually build to a series of aggravated clusters. Track two, Ass Gamelan, sparsely integrates the lutes for a nebulously Moroccan-tinged take on Indonesian bell music: it wouldn’t be out of place in the Tribecastan catalog. After the similarly hypnotic, Asian-flavored Before the Clouds Come featuring Valdivia’s plinky mbira, they blast through the punk-jazz Tag Track Locate, basically a coda and variations that clock in at under two minutes.

A tone poem of sorts, Scattered Through the Strings is exactly as the title describes it, rippling, glissandoing lutes and then Haas’ alto elevating just a little over over the creaky rattle behind him. Why Is the Devil Here is a vaudevillian swing tune wearing a jajouka disguise, wave after wave of blaring reeds (Haas playing alto and hojok simultaneously). The most memorable tune here, a warped Middle Eastern waltz with jangly tanbour, Dance with a Jinn contrasts spiky textures with ominously boomy drums. They close the album with the blazing, buzzy Curse of the Horns, the most traditional “free jazz” track here (if you buy the idea that free jazz can possibly be traditional), a series of alternate universes that peacefully coexist until a couple of clever false endings. Who is the audience for this? Anyone who likes a unique sound that defies pigeonholing. Haas has been a force in improvisational music for years in New York; watch this space for upcoming live shows.


from Jazzwise magazine
March 2012
"Short Cuts/New Releases"
Selwyn Harris

Ask the Oracle (Resonantmusc)
Canadian reedsman Andy Haas of Martha and the Muffins fame and NYC downtown credentials leads a Prime Time-influenced hometown jazz skronk quintet.


from The New York City Jazz Record
May 2012

Ask the Oracle
Andy Haas (Resonantmusic)
by Elliott Simon

Ask the Oracle is an open vehicle for saxophonist Andy Haas to stretch out his worldly and otherworldly musical ideas in the context of a group of Toronto-based musicians. Haas, who is a legend in these environs for his stint with Martha and the Muffins, has no trouble in connecting with like-minded jammers from up North, to whom he brings several decades of first-call NYC experience. The session is notable for its use of world instruments such as African thumb piano, zither-like Chinese guzhheng, lute-like Persian tanbour and double reed Korean hojok.

There is a lot of rhythmic potential here with bassist Aaron Lumley and percussionists Brandon Valdivia and Matthew "Doc" Dunn up in the mix. When they are allowed to coalesce into a groove, Haas and multi-instrumentalist Colin Fisher are freed up to do their "thing", which can be described as broadly informed worldly improvisation against a danceable beat. Haas can blow his soprano sax to smithereens but amazingly manages to avoid completely what can be the instrument's somewhat annoying toy-like sound. Fisher is a great string-smith and impresses with his mood-inducing colors. He plays a mean electric guitar, is at home on the guzheng and tanbour and with his bluesy tenor sax can go head to head with Haas.

"Surfing to Canada", "Ass Gamelan" and "Dance With a Jinn" are the standouts here and invite relistening.The first tune is a brilliant combination of surf speed guitar, exotic rhythms and captivating sax melodic figures that introduces 2-tone to the Middle East. The hypnotic percussive faux gamelan backdrop of "Ass Gamelan" opens up a space for the horns to interact in the finest jazz of the session while "Dance With a Jinn" seductively engages through dense rhythmic undercurrents and Middle-Eastern repartee between sax and strings. When presenting rhythmically grounded worldly excursions such as these, Ask the Oracle succeds admirably but in this milieu the free-est tunes seem to be in search of a homeland.


from The Whole Note
Written by Ken Waxman, Published: 28 September 2012

Ask The Oracle
Andy Haas
Resonant Music 009

You can go home again; at least that’s what reedist Andy Haas, a Torontonian domiciled in New York, proves with this CD. Haas, who will be playing solo saxophone at OCAD University October 17 with trumpet and electronics player JP Carter in a concert presented by the Music Gallery, was in Toronto last year to record this fine eight-track set of improvisations alongside locals Colin Fisher playing saxophone and strings, Aaron Lumley on bass, plus Brandon Valdivia and Matthew Dunn on percussion.

Although Haas was a member of the Martha & The Muffins pop band and the other four are imbedded in this city’s improv community, the tunes mostly balance on the boundaries among rock, jazz and world music. With Haas playing hojok or Korean oboe as well as soprano saxophone and flute, some of the tracks are as delicate as Eastern court music, others are dependent on choppy guitar distortion or overblown reed riffs which could have migrated from 1960s “energy music.”

Especially pertinent is comparing a track such as Curse of the Horns to Scattered Through the Strings. On the former, Lumley’s thick bass scrubs concentrate the proceedings with a Westernized ostinato as both percussionists clatter and ruff while Fisher on tenor saxophone and Haas on soprano snort and squeal in tandem. In contrast, the other piece exposes Fisher’s command of the multi-string guzheng, with his spidery glissandi weaving a polyphonic sound web through which Haas’ saxophone lines cut with sharp reed bites.