Year of the Snake is the second ECM album by Fly, the collective trio of Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard. It pushes further against the conventions of the saxophone, bass and drums format. This is a band of equals, never a soloist with accompaniment. The music is more often cool-headed and thoughtful than incantatory, and it weaves improvisation and composition so closely that the joins are hard to find.
The three players go back a long way. Grenadier and Ballard played together as teenagers in California in the early 1980s, and both met Turner after moving to the East Coast in 1990. The group first appeared as the Jeff Ballard Trio in 2000 and took the name Fly with a first album on Savoy in 2004, before Sky & Country brought it to ECM. Year of the Snake was recorded in January 2011 at Avatar Studios in New York, with Aya Merrill engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Turner plays tenor saxophone, Grenadier double bass and Ballard drums, and all three write.
The album is framed by The Western Lands, five short pieces scattered through the sequence. The first is Turner's, the other four are credited to the whole trio, and one lasts barely half a minute. Between them sit longer tunes by each member. The swaying Salt and Pepper, by Ballard and Turner, is the most openly jazzy track. On Turner's title piece the tenor glides over fizzing drums and turns into a long, patiently built improvisation. Grenadier contributes Kingston, the longest track at just over ten minutes, and Ballard adds Diorite and Benj. Turner often works in the high register of the tenor, with long, very pure tones.
Reviewing it in The Guardian in April 2012, John Fordham placed the album "up there with Fly's best work, with its rustling fast grooves and languid horn lines". Thom Jurek of AllMusic found it the most unusual of the trio's three recordings, one that "unhinges preconceived notions about the saxophone trio with complete freedom minus the chaos of disorder". Fordham also counted Fly among the great contemporary jazz small groups, praising Grenadier's tone and Ballard's mix of textural playing and whiplash power.
CD edition, ECM 2235, first released by ECM in April 2012.
