Dreamstuff – A Sax-Drums Duo Album

Jeff Marx & Jeff “Siege” Siegel

Dreamstuff, by Jeff Marx and Jeff “Siege” Siegel, starts wild, with what may be an homage to John Coltrane and Rashied Ali’s Interstellar Space, their stunning and rambunctious tenor sax-drums duo album. The rest of the album veers away from the Coltrane-style “sheets of sound” that the first track, “Harps,” embraces.

I’m listening to it on my newly repaired Cayin N3Pro, using the triode-tube amplification mode. I think that for anyone even curious about what tube amplification (done well) sounds like, this DAP is a first step into the hi-fi world of portable tube amplification. It is more than the “Little Bear” headphone amplifier provides, as it is much more than a decoding headphone amplifier. It is a full-fledged digital audio player. Though it does not have Wi-fi or streaming service capabilities, it does have Bluetooth and has four amplification modes and allows for both single-ended 3.5-mm line-level output and balanced 4.4-mm line-level output. The balanced headphone jack is the same jack as the balanced line-level output. I’ll end the product endorsement by saying Dreamstuff sounds excellent on it.

“Harps,” my favorite track on the album, begins with Jeff Marx on tenor sax, running up and down the scale, doing arpeggios, with a reverb that adds some sense of space, even with solid-state amplification. The drums come in soon after, with Jeff “Siege” Siegel doing a patter on the ride cymbal, that is so fast it is barely believable.

The track “Kind of Like Talking” reminds me of the album One in Two – Two in One, a live recording by Max Roach (d.) and Anthony Braxton (reeds).

It is a spare, slower track, with lots of space. It’s followed by “Tumble,” with is aptly named. The drums seem to tumble. The tenor solos throughout. At one point, Marx pumps the sax for some full-bodied, resonant low notes, and I love it when a big sax does that. I’ve heard a bass saxophone snap out some notes and pump some low tones, on là, a classical-jazz crossover album.

I like this album, especially “Harps” and “Esposition,” since the drums and sax both really open up and play as in play the way a child plays. This is not cocktail bar music. This is rock ‘n roll-ish, head-banging jazz. Only, it’s better than that. And when it comes to paying homage to the roots of the sax-drums jazz duo, they incorporate what I take to be references, especially in “Bird’s Sanctuary,” to the aforementioned albums Interstellar Space, One in Two – Two in One, and another Max Roach-Anthony Braxton album, which must be heard to be believed (especially the first track, “Birth”), Birth and Re-birth.