Nigel Price And Alban Claret: Entente Cordiale (Elsden Music EM05)
Entente is so cordiale in this joint album by guitarists Nigel Price and Alban Claret that it’s almost impossible to distinguish between them in terms of the sounds they make and the vistas they open up. Without invoking anything gladiatorial, they mirror each other’s finesse in tailor-made yet venturesome formats.
If you can’t tell one from the other before you start, it’s useful to know who is emerging from which channel (Price from the left, Claret from the right). Subtle changes of presentation keep altering the picture. In Jerome Kern’s I’m Old-Fashioned, for example, there’s a florid Price solo intro before he takes charge of the head, giving way to a string of choruses by Frenchman Claret. This track also illustrates the album’s internal revisions: bassist Mikele Montolli judges nicely when to up the tempo, decelerate for chorus-chasing by Price, and sprinting again before ending with a worthy solo of his own.
Montolli delivers another bustling solo straight after Claret’s theme statement on Kurt Weill’s This Is New. And while we’re lodged in the rhythm section, where solos relieve the guitar duo’s to-and-fro tingle, it’s important to note how drummer Matt Fishwick moves things along emphatically with brushes on Bill Evans’ Time Remembered and with brushwork and hi-hatted assertion on Mingus’s Self Portrait In Three Colours. This is a quartet whose members are working for and with each other.
Recording engineer Greg Dowling tells me Price and Claret warmed up to advantage before any of the tracks was laid down – which explains why in Sam Jones’s Bittersuite (even though it might not have been the first out of the starting-gate) they are caught as if in mid-flight. Both buzz with vitality and passion. Duo responsibilities were also variously delegated in Woody Shaw’s The Moontrane: first sharing the theme, then playing two chase choruses apiece (including swops), and afterwards reprising that two-headed opening. Fishwick’s drumming takes on turbulent character in the following chart, Frank Foster’s Simone. Here the guitars alternate for the opener, which quickly segues into another Montolli solo, then chases by Price and Claret and back to Price for the conclusion.
Foster, Mingus, Evans, Shaw, Jones, Silver (in Silver’s Serenade) – the album is a tribute to jazz composition as much as a reminder of the momentarily misplaced, exemplified by Emily Remler’s Blues For Herb, with stops and swops and a joint head reprised, and Clare Fischer’s Pensativa, an uptempo bossa with Fishwick deepening the intensity.
Dowling came up with the album’s title as well as engineering the perfect recording and enabling a reviewer to fashion a smart intro!
Garden: Pilgrim (Losen Records LOS 3022)
Teasing liner notes often amuse in telling one little about the music being played. This is especially true of the latest album by Garden, the trio led by Norwegian tenor-saxophonist Mathias Hagen, which everywhere attracts admiring attention to its quality as a threesome venture exploring a variety of generally subdued moods capable of being moderately cheerful.
Detailed explanations will mean more to those who conceive the tunes, such as the trio numbers to which the name “Louis” is attached: Louis In Bluesian, Louis The Vagabond, and Louis In Hindsight, the first a tenor solo of bluesy mien (what else?), the second an appealing, almost comical number in which our hero sets out on his travels, and the third a reflective coda. The first and last are just over a minute long. Hagen says the identity of “Louis” shall remain secret.
By this time, in any case, it’s the rapport Hagen enjoys with bassist Henrik Sandstad Dalen and drummer Øystein Aarnes Vik which has caught the ear, Vik setting up and sustaining light but affirmative patterns and Dalen sidling up melodically to the leader, as in the final “Louis” chart and elsewhere. Hagen himself is unflappable, though in personifying Louis the wayfarer he embraces the album’s title and is roused to some perambulating purpose.
The three are augmented on the almost eerie West, another of the album’s five brevities, by baritone saxophonist Henrik Büller, and on four other tracks by the restrained percussion of Arne Martin Nybo. The eponymous Pilgrim, according to explanation, is a chart about journeying. It’s what one might call “measured Nordic” in form but in programmatic content may or may not suggest voyages “across mountains and vast deserts in search of the holy land”, nor indicate that sections of the route might have to be undertaken by “underwhelming” low-cost Eurocoach. Hagen’s tenor progress, however, is even and unperturbed.
The spectral nature of West darkens in Shelter, a multi-layered and sometimes dissonant composition based on recordings of air-raid sirens. It’s one of a final trio of tracks suggesting that the traveller’s destination may have to cloud over before better weather arrives. Under Ground, conceived in the basement of Gothenburg’s Academy of Music and Drama, possibly alludes to an artist’s embattled state or even an underground shelter. Who Knows? It certainly finds Hagen at his most voluble, albeit determined not to be hurried or harried. He ends the final Warsong – “Of war I know little; of peace I have plenty. I wish it was easier to share” – with a short, pacific coda following an uptempo, even urgent link with the sirens track. Aisha, a nocturne with its percussion add-on like a thin band of light coming and going on the horizon, is a witty memoir of Hagen’s stay at the home of composer Kristian Blak and the cat that drank the water in his glass at night.
Dario Miranda: La Dormiente (Losen Records LOS 3002)
More outdoor perspectives from Norway’s Losen, despatched with classy if sombre cover art that might militate against the sunnier climes inhabited by Italian bassist Miranda, flugel-trumpeter Luca Aquino and guitarist Giovanni Francesca. Recorded in 2023, like Garden’s album, the small combo almost guarantees a degree of intimacy, reinforced by Miranda’s assertion that this is music “for quiet moments, never strenuous, never even trying to impress the listener. Instead using silence as a weapon…” Weaponised silence might almost seem to be an oxymoron and trying to impress the listener is surely no bad thing; one supposes it depends on how and why the impression is being made.
Like Pilgrim too, La Dormiente suggests sound combinations one might not expect from a restricted personnel, even when Miranda supplements two tracks – Miniera Inesplorata and Milioni Di Scale – with shimmering electronica – and one – Con Paura Il Cuore – with dulcitone. The three musicians also exhibit personalities that are consistent in their differences. Francesca is quietly industrious, Aquino lyrical with eruptive tendencies, and Miranda a big presence with firmness of tread as well as deep-mined invention.
The influence, according to Miranda, is Gaian in that all three in the environs of Sannio are watched over by Mother Earth, embodied in the Taburno-Camposauro massif, a landmark of strength and tranquillity. From the outset in Dolce Rumore, Miranda’s bass, whether bowed or plucked, is a formidable presence. When played pizzicato in Nel Bosco, it encourages the almost diffident guitar to stay in the frame, a function also performed by Aquino’s flamboyance, which includes a familiar jazz trumpet quote.
There’s almost a sense of stasis on some tracks, a feeling of phrases floated into the ether for all to pick up, and tunes existing almost as fragments, as on Con Paura Il Cuore, where guitar and horn laze around a motif in process of coming into being, and on Ciò Che Non Siamo, where Aquino’s laid-back reveille above a repeated guitar figure has scarcely evolved before Miranda enters to give everything a lift and the horn climbs to exuberant heights. Immagine Passeggera opens with tentative duetting by arco bass and horn against gentle guitar accompaniment before Aquino’s flourishes join with a more exploratory guitar voice.
Also like Pilgrim, there are a couple of “shorts”, Sugli Alberi being a bass monologue, and Miliono Di Scale a quick sketch for muted horn and painterly electronics.
The solidity of that mountain might for some be at odds with music that now and then seems edgy and unsettled, but maybe it’s because the massif is shaped like a reclining woman and stimulates a mixed response.