Grammarians be damned; the members of Thiefs know that language is an ever-evolving thing. Not just because the spelling of their name would make their English teachers twitch – that’s just an inside joke born of a Nas lyric. Their music, on the other hand, is a far more radical rethinking of the jazz vocabulary, a hybrid patois fluent in the jargon of electronica, hip-hop, and the limitless possibilities of modern jazz. On their self-titled debut, Thiefs – drummer/vocalist Guillermo E Brown, bassist Keith Witty, and saxophonist Christophe Panzani – retriangulate the jazz trio with a post-modern ethos, alive to the myriad sounds and options available to the contemporary artist. Dense with layers of sound and spontaneous invention, their music is nonetheless inviting and thrilling to listeners better versed in more forward-looking forms of modern pop music. If jazz hadn’t been invented until the day after tomorrow, it would sound a lot like Thiefs. “It’s music made from a limitless sound palette,” explains Witty, “but that aims to be straightforward in its delivery. There’s no end to the experimentation that we might undertake to create sounds and rhythms, but we always tend towards inclusion in the music that we make.” Witty and Brown have been working together for almost twenty years, since both were students in the renowned music department at Wesleyan University, studying under the likes of Anthony Braxton and Jay Hoggard. In the years since, they’ve worked together in a wide variety of contexts, including bands led by Brown as well as such masters as Dave Burrell and the late David S. Ware. Brown was the longtime drummer in Ware’s groundbreaking quartet with Matthew Shipp and William Parker, and leader of the avant-electronica band Beat Kids and frontman for no-wave neo-soul group Pegasus Warning. Witty has worked with fellow envelope-pushers such as Jonathan Finlayson, Taylor Ho Bynum and Matana Roberts as well as genre-defying singers Amel Larrieux, Somi, and Pyeng Threadgill. He is also composer-in-residence for New York City Opera’s education program. Witty met Panzani during his frequent visits to Paris; the saxophonist is heavily in-demand on the French jazz scene and has toured extensively with the Carla Bley Big Band and French hip hop outfit Hocus Pocus. Thiefs came together underthe auspices of a French American Jazz Exchange grant , a joint program of FACE (French American Cultural Exchange) and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Being scattered across two continents necessitated composing music separately, though each piece has gone through an extensive editing process by the trio as a whole. Natural disaster provided the opportunity for the album’s sole group-composed piece, “Hurricane Daze” – with a gig at New York’s Jazz Gallery cancelled by Hurricane Sandy, the trio seized the chance to concoct a Thiefs tune from scratch, resulting in a nervy, tension-fueled song with a crushing momentum to match the storm that raged around them. A producer in his own right, with credits including the singers Abiah and Somi, Witty was determined to make the most of the tools available to the trio in the studio, to make not a raw live document but an album that stands on its own. Their approach ran the gamut from tunes like “Doute/s” and “Play Me At Night,” recorded live on the Jazz Gallery’s stage and left untouched, to pieces like “All Day” and “Hurricane Daze,” which, Witty says, were “built like paintings, one layer at a time.” The bassist continues, “The idea of production and jazz seem to have parted company in the modern era. The records that our generation grew up listening to, even if they were recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s living room, had somebody there trying to sculpt the sound of the record. Thiefs isn’t completely a creature of the studio, but we’re clearly not afraid of using the studio as a space of development.” They’re also not afraid of bringing vocals into the mix, as on the poignant “Daybaby,” which Witty wrote on the day he and his wife confirmed that a baby was on the way; the song blends all the hope, fear, and joy that such a momentous occasion carries with it. “The World Without Us” is a lament from the Earth’s perspective on the loss of humanity, inspired in part by Alan Weisman’s speculative book of the same name, while “Olive Island” is reconfigured from Brown’s Pegasus Warning repertoire. The latter is also a prime example of how the trio integrates vocals, with Brown’s lyrics occupying only a brief portion of the track’s eight minutes, but influencing the rich improvisation that stems from it. “That concept stems from the roots of jazz,” Witty says. “There was always instrumental jazz and there was always vocal jazz, and vocal jazz was always very close to the popular song formats of the day. Guillermo is truly a contemporary vocalist right now, singing in styles that are very much of this moment in popular music, even if it’s on the fringes of that popular music.” Thiefs’ unique sound, at once adventurous and accessible, is a natural outgrowth of its three members’ combined sensibilities, along with guest appearances by Japanese pianist Shoko Nagai and French accordion master Vincent Peirani. “It’s all about putting personalities together in a room and seeing what flows most easily,” Witty says. “If Christophe and I had gotten together with a different drummer we would have made completely different music, and the same would be true if Guillermo and I joined another saxophone player. This was really a result what comes out of these three people most naturally.” - Shaun Brady