During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed instudying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so muchAfro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every cornerof jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for itto fit so many forms while retaining it's own essence? The result isaleap into the unknown for Westerlund Curiosities from the Shift, a12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies,where Westerlund's clave enthusiasm collides with his texturalexperimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes handswith friends decorating this space alongside him.The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities' first half begins with thejunkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame InchTemInchand ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos andshakers on InchCan Tangle.Inch There is a hard-won joy to these numbers,as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential deadend but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs becamea kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund exploresacross Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener InchNuMale UnoInch to the uncanny amorphousness of closer InchFelt LikeFloating.Inch All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm,like the loping strut at the center of InchMidpointInch and the head-noddingpulse that winds through InchPersurverance,Inch winkingly misspelled tosuit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those arespringboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the NewAge references-shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiringflutes-that circle through InchMidpointInch or the dub-indebted delays andgamelan hymns that bubble up through InchPersurverance.Inch This isdeeply multivalent music, each number's propulsive corecounterbalanced by a series of surpris