By Michael J. West | Published September 2026
I wanted to make a crack about how BCDELUXE is “the solo bass clarinet album the masses have been clamoring for,” but, by God, the masses should have been clamoring for it. You’d swear it was a demonstration disc on what the instrument was capable of, if D’Angelo didn’t have — and nail — such high artistic ambitions.
This can’t be called an unaccompanied bass clarinet album, because D’Angelo’s axe accompanies itself, via overdubs of differing timbres and textures. “Blues Lightening” offers three versions of D’Angelo, with soft-edged smoothness on the bottom and coarser, more aggressive tones in the foreground (though at some points the triple voices blend together), and it swings like hell. “Sonification” puts the breathy drones up front, with the higher, more melodic D’Angelo further back and drenched in reverb; the effect, not unlike that of medieval polyphony in an old stone church, is beautiful.
D’Angelo doesn’t need the multitracking. He swings without it on the brief interlude “Dingsbums” and achieves a folksier gait on another quickie, “Referendum.” Yet it’s hard to argue with the results when he does double or treble himself. “PK 3809” is exquisite, a romantic lullaby with an organ-like pedal point and delicate lyrical strains. The masterpiece of the session, however, is the closing “Light Language” (at nine-and-a-half minutes, almost twice the length of the second-longest track). The long drone tones are the highest voicing, creating a Bill Frisell-like atmosphere, with the low end being soft to the point of inaudibility at times and the middle tones carrying the melodies. At least, that’s the default setting; the three voices interweave, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in counterpoint; they play calls and responses, and they leave each other space to comment. Loveland Records owner Jakob Bro, who once roomed with D’Angelo and heard him practicing solo bass clarinet, long knew what the rest of us can now attest: All by himself, D’Angelo is both a virtuoso and a visionary. –Michael J. West
