John Gunther’s Axis Mundi
Healing Song (CIMP 163), Above Now Below (CIMP 176) and Gone Fishin’ (CIMP 232)

THE Colorado tenor saxophonist John Gunther (born in Denver in 1966) calls his band Axis Mundi and says that the words refer “to the place where human consciousness reaches for the eternal, where the earthly realm meets the spiritual.”

Some aspirations indeed for a jazz musician, especially one whose sounds reflect and affirm the many musics of the world.

Gunther learned saxophone at school, while he was also striving to understand his mother’s painting. “When I was very young I would look at a group of her paintings and she would ask me how my eye travelled through each one or how light and shadow would feel in relation to each other.” Listening to the buoyancy and almost aeriform qualities of his sound, you wonder how much that visual apprenticeship somehow transferred into his sense of sonics.

Gunther is a scholar of jazz formation. After gaining degrees in the music at the University of Miami and Berklee College of Music in Boston, he teaches jazz improvisation and arrangement at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

It was in September 1997 that he made his first Axis Mundi album at the Spirit Room in rural New York state. With him was another Colorado-based musician and teacher — the trumpeter Ron Miles; bassist Leo Huppert and drummer Jay Rosen. Gunther composed and arranged all the tunes of Healing Song with the exception of Monk’s Crepsecule with Nellie, a beautifully poised duet between the two horns.

It’s Gunther, Rosen and Huppert for the opener Three Are We, a vibrant swinger, and when Miles comes in for Jung and the Restless it’s a different sound. Huppert’s pulse is lithe with Rosen’s snares and Miles and Gunther harmonise and palaver. Perhaps Gunther’s boyhood lessons are still to the fore in the quasi-aerial movement of Pablo and the light and shade of its tinges of Latin sound.

Gunther’s lonesome soprano and Miles’s muted horn express a forlorn fantasy in Booboo Joins the Circus before Huppert and Rosen up the pace and suddenly we are all in the ring, with Miles in particular on the trapeze. Miles flies and soars in the waltz-like Sound Byte, where Huppert’s strings pulsate, and on the album’s title tune his bow saws a subterranean timbre beneath Miles’s heraldic horn. Gunther’s saxophone blows its message while levitating over the unified sound.

In June 1998 the same musicians returned to the Spirit Room to cut Axis Mundi’s second album Above Now Below, each word signifying a suite. With them was violinist Rob Thomas, born in Portland, Oregon, in 1954, and his voice from the opener Speonk onwards, adds a sprightly sound to the ensemble. He grooves forward on Deja Vu while on Country Waltz Gunther’s clarinet and Miles’s trumpet make a homesome harmony, with Thomas’s plucked strings and Gunther’s flute finding colloquy on Chant #1.

Bwee-Aahh was more enticing Gunther clarinet, as if from an earlier jazz age with echoes of Buddy de Franco, and Colemanation is the fivesome’s tribute to the pioneer Ornette. Rosen’s gift of drums, Gunther’s water-borne tenor and Thomas’s spiky phrases all make their salute.

Axis Mundi made their third album Gone Fishin’ in 2000 and brought into the Spirit Room a much more cosmopolitan selection of tunes, spaced out between more Gunther compositions and angling allusions.

After Gunther’s soprano saxophone song on Yes My Name Is, with a powerful Caribbean lilt the band stokes up, with Miles in strong and joyous fettle. The traditional Native American song of victory Aotzi No-Itz follows, beginning with Rosen’s quiescent drums and growing into a powerful ensemble declaration. Thomas’s Oregon fiddle jumps into the Antilles for Nino and Kiva while Gunther’s tenor tells the story.

The west African roots of Mbira Music feed an American harmony of violin and trumpet while Gunther’s clarinet leads to proceedings on Birthday Blues, switching back to soprano for Catch of the Day, where Thomas’s plucked strings help to create a pulsating beat before his whirling solo.

Miles and Gunther combine for another brief but compelling Monk duet on Monk’s Mood and as the quintet check out gleefully with their angling jam Bait and Tackle, the listener only hopes that after 15 years they will make another visit to the Spirit Room. As Charlie Parker once said: “It’s time!”