The Weather Up There, drummer Jeremy Cunningham’s second album as a bandleader, is part of a lineage of jazz that uses diverse musical forms to contemplate death and bereavement. Grief, to cite a famous example, prompted Alice Coltrane to turn to the tamboura and oud after the death of her husband, John. More recently, it led the pianist Kenny Werner to mix orchestra and choir on No Beginning, No End, and trumpeter Dave Douglas to synthesize bluegrass, traditional hymns, and Sibelius on Be Still. After suffering a loss, jazz history suggests, musicians look beyond their immediate surroundings, as though seeking beauty in parts of the world they might have missed before.

In 2008, Cunningham was a straight-ahead player in his native Cincinnati, almost finished with college and hoping to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music. His younger brother Andrew was playing video games at home when two men, carrying AK-47s, broke down the door. Having mistaken Andrew for his roommate, Tyler, they beat Andrew with their gun butts and robbed the house. Tyler, who was in the shower, managed to run across the lawn and call for help; the two men shot and killed Andrew.

In shock, Cunningham bombed his graduate school audition and moved to Chicago, where straight-ahead became another color in a wide musical palette. Over the course of the next decade, he became close with some of the city’s most forward-thinking virtuosos: guitarist Jeff Parker, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Makaya McCraven, all of whom play on The Weather Up There.

The record is cut with the voices of family and friends from back home, who recount his brother’s murder. The emotionally complex interplay between these spoken samples and the shifting ambiance of Cunningham’s jazz fusion makes for a story of mourning that simultaneously illuminates the strangeness of life after tragedy. Opener “Sleep” begins with elegiac OP-1 synthesizer textures as Cunningham’s aunt describes a dream about Andrew. “All of my dreams from people who have died,” she says, the song slipping into Reid’s sentimental strings and Josh Johnson’s saxophone swells, “all take place in my kitchen, for some reason.” The music’s doleful mood breaks abruptly. The exuberant half-note pulses that begin “1985” evoke the pop of “Bennie and the Jets” or “Super Rich Kids,” and then Cunningham and his collaborators loosen their playing styles to match Parker’s guitar heroics: a light skein of feedback and a couple solos.

With Parker producing, alongside New Breed bandmate Paul Bryan, the album’s construction is imbued with a sensitive, meticulous studio wizardry. That’s particularly true of “Elegy,” a harrowing voice collage: Recordings Cunningham made of his Cincinnati community—his sister, his ex-girlfriend, his brother’s best friend—speak with each other about Andrew, join together like a choir, and discuss the need for gun control. They’re accompanied by the “drum choir” Cunninghman formed to play on the track, an assemblage of Chicago percussion talent whose potentially climactic inclusion on the album he idiosyncratically buries under his hometown’s memories of tragedy.

The spoken sections ground Cunningham’s vision in its subject matter, distinguishing his unique way of processing grief; it’s impossible to mistake the album’s sorrowful origins. The Weather Up There is taut and well-sequenced enough to occasionally risk becoming background music, but its long monologues snap the listener to attention. They grate with their unmusicality, and sometimes delve too deep into exposition about that awful night in 2008. They also allow for a record of dualities that plucks the listener out of the march of ordinary habit and into the pain of another, before revealing the many ways that life can become new again. Daily concerns seem to fall away during Cunningham’s collective emotional journey—even the act of criticism itself.

Buy: Rough Trade

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