The Fully Celebrated

No one ever thinks of free jazz, or whatever the kids are calling it these days, as being sexy, and pretty often it’s not. The sense of fun can get suffocated by academic science or transcendental piety, and the audience winds up suffering for the art as much as the artist does. Really, what’s the point?

Boston free-bird Jim Hobbs and his trio, the Fully Celebrated, get it, and the proof is in its latest sweat-soaked album, Drunk on the Blood of the Holy Ones. The disc has that airy, open feel and loose-limbed instinct that make the music immediately appealing, as well as an Ornette-ish pedigree in Hobbs’s darting alto saxophone flights. Yet the group’s rhythmic concept is as deeply rooted in earthy rhythm & blues sensibilities as it is in pulse tracks and atmospheric swoosh. Timo Shanko’s basslines sometimes recall the clean harmonic mesh and folksy charm of Charlie Haden, but with drummer Django Carranza, the rhythm section glides seamlessly from dubby textures to bucket-of-blood swagger.

The melodic vampiness affords Hobbs room to roam, both in the streetwise, shoulder-bobbing “Moose and Grizzly Bear’s Ville” and in the long-tone longueurs of “Pearl’s Blues (Your What Hurts?).” He occasionally grows meditative, dropping into a knuckle-dragging register for a burly groan or puffing out little cirrus clouds that float by like melancholic memories. Then the daydream dissolves, and it’s time for rump-rolling. The trio plays in Park Slope this week; go see ’em with someone you fuck.—Steve Dollar

The Fully Celebrated plays Barbès Thu 28.

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