Little Waves

Matt Jones of Crescent lets in more light on Little Waves, his fifth album as the leader of Crescent. The openness of the sound here brings the group closer to their sibling group, Movietone (with whom they share significant membership), though Jones’s songs are more traditionally folksy; he gets surprisinglhy playful on “Hey, September,” and the drowsy brass quartet that parps through “Nearly Ready” is like a drunken marching band set loose in the studio. One of the guests here is Naoto Kawate, a Japanese euphonium player who spent time in Tori Kudo’s Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and like Kudo’s music, Crescent embraces the charm in error and stumble; consequently, Little Waves feels looser, freer, more attuned to the incidental.