There appears to be nothing vertiginous in saxophonist-composer Julian Costello’s album, generous at an hour long, brave in its inclusion of a cello and hovering musically above the Middle and Far East. The speeds are leisurely, the musicians’ relationships to each other relaxed, and the emotions conveyed never running to urgent or febrile.
The band’s a quartet with guests, and includes cellist Natalie Rozario and guitarist and oud-player Stefanos Tsourelis. With Costello on soprano and tenor saxes, Sophie Alloway providing steadfast but nuanced drumming, and guests David Beebee on bass and Iqbal Pathan on tabla, an East-West fusion is accomplished.
Rozario’s role amounts to compositional daring on Costello’s part and on what is intended to be a jazz album – well, it arrived at Jazz Journal for due notice. Costello doesn’t write for it as a jazz instrument: it doesn’t bend notes or swing, for want of a better term. In fact, its broad phrasing and autumnal colour are exactly as the classical genre usually presents them. They provide a structural platform that contrasts nicely with Alloway’s kit and has the last word on the final, wittily titled track Sorry But No Reprise, a layered solo brevity that rounds things off. Costello’s lyrical sax and Tsourelis’s piping guitar (when he’s not the oudman) spiral off those platforms to nail the album’s secure jazz credentials.
Bound by Rozario’s cello and an easy ensemble sound, solos merge invisibly one into another on the opening track – a kind of upbeat lament – and elsewhere. They arise (maybe) on Inspector Morse from the single-note repetition of the signature tune from the TV series, explore Eastern flavours on Stonehenge and others, achieve hypnotic stasis on Still Water and The King Cobra, adopt ballad mode on Why, riff on Ooh I Like Your Suit, and follow repetitive simplicity on 42 Sydney Street and Look At Yourself Without A Smile – and so on.
Intriguing titles all, on charts that keep listeners focused rather than requiring them to follow the gallop or the canter beyond boundaries.
Discography
Sorry But No; Inspector Morse; Stonehenge; The Whale; To Be Fair; Still Water; Why; Ooh I Like Your Shirt; Look At Yourself With A Smile; 42 Sydney Street; The King Cobra; Sorry But No Reprise (61.16)
Costello (ts, ss); Natalie Rozario (clo); Stefanos Tsourelis (g, oud); Sophie Alloway (d); Iqbal Pathan (tab); David Beebee (b). Seaford, East Sussex, November 2023.
Elsden Music EM08
