Creesus Crisis

A new jazz group from Calgary, Canada: Eric Hamelin, J. C. Jones and Jay Crocker, playing drums, trombone and guitar-electronics. Young guys, ruckus makers, doing some subversion, scratching out their signatures. They’re as do-it-yourself as it gets, but they’re not out of nowhere: you can draw a pretty straight line from Thelonious Monk to Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy’s early-’60s band, through the more traditional edge of New York’s loft-jazz scene in the 1970s (Frank Lowe and Billy Bang records come near it), to No More Shapes’ first record, “Creesus Crisis” (Drip Audio). The album has a likably garagey sound as the trio hustles through moody, splintery bop and clattery rock. But the ballads, like “New Years (Yves’)” and “Invisible Glasses,” really make its case, building and subsiding, putting emphasis on tune and atmosphere, not behaving along jazz’s usual theme-solos-theme grid. No More Shapes might not make it to the Vanguard, but there’s a strong feeling of right place and right time; you get the sense that they might construct their own.
-New York Times