This album represents both a turning away from the more challenging music Lloyd’s quartet has recorded in the past (for the adventurous Swiss label hatART and others) and an accommodation with “contemporary jazz” of a neo-ECM order. The resulting music is of a polite, restrained but far from rarefied type that’s heavily over-represented on record in this century. Comparison (often a risky endeavour in the world of improvised music) with the quartet’s 1997 album By Confusion bears this out.
Lloyd’s switching from alto and soprano saxes to tenor by no means accounts for this transformation, but his work on Breaking The Waves sounds like that of a musician who’s drunk deeply from mid-period Garbarek, when the edges had been smoothed off the Norwegian’s work and the result coated with a veneer of atmosphere and an apparent desire to make a virtue of restraint. This quality which is very much the order of the day on River.
Meta Meta is as close to intriguing as anything on this set thanks in no small part to Law’s contribution, which hints at other less densely populated musical territory and also at what might have been had risk-taking not been so emphatically struck off the agenda. The Trip is more rhythmically invigorated, but still marked as far as I can hear by a collective desire to ensure that not a horse, nor indeed a jazz hack, is startled.
Discography
Al’Afiyah; Breaking The Waves; Cinq Feuilles; Flux; River; Meta Meta; Lanovo; Desert Song; The Trip; The Heron (69.35)
Lloyd (ts); John Law (p); Nick Pini (b); Alex Goodyear (d). Crescent Studios, Swindon, 28, 29 April 2023.
Ubuntu Music UBU0162
