As what passed for summer in the UK turns distinctly to autumn / the downpour season, the tide of jazz-related “product” proves impervious to climate change. In musical terms, the present day 24/7 availability of something not unlike everything has the curious effect of marginalising even further those forms that were marginalised by dint of “difficulty” decades back, facilitating the predominance of the post-bop or dancefloor-oriented mainstream.
Kuba’s music sidesteps the ECM label’s approach even though it’s been captured in similarly antiseptic fidelity
Kuba: Laukumi (Jersika Records)
Kuba were a six-piece Latvian band who split up in 2006 in the midst of working on their second album Laukumi, which is now out. Their music, perhaps unsurprisingly given how the label’s influence is arguably a lot more pronounced now than it was then, sidesteps the ECM label’s approach even though it’s been captured in similarly antiseptic fidelity. On a deeper level, as in the degree to which it absorbs the influences of post-rock and ambient music in some of its less stilted manifestations, it exhibits an approach which in these culturally conservative days seems kind of unassumingly subversive.
Steve Baczkowski: Cheap Fabric (Relative Pitch Records RPR1187)
The Relative Pitch label is an independent voice documenting “demanding” music. Steve Baczkowski’s solo saxophones and woodwinds on the album Cheap Fabric are notable for the degree to which they sidestep the likes of Braxton, Brotzmann, Coxhill, Hemphill, Lacy and Parker in such a stark setting, albeit with a measure of Brotzmann’s expressionist vibrato in the baritone sax playing, as on Old Light.
The guitar / piano duo of Andy Moor and Marta Warelis has Escape out on the same label. Their music takes in extended techniques and sometimes gives the intriguing impression of a duo almost forensically concerned with the nature of sound as such, as on Maintenance Cabbage, a title which I picked out not merely because I wanted the rare opportunity to type the titular words in that order.
Niklas Fite & Gunter Christmann: Insisting (Corbett vs. Dempsey CvsDCD111)
The Corbett vs. Dempsey label through a similar hinterland and this month’s batch brought Insisting by the duo of guitarist Niklas Fite and cellist Gunter Christmann. By way perhaps of intending to deter the faint-hearted, the words “free improvised music” get the same billing as the title on the CD sleeve, in a way that could be seen as a variation on the theme of the parental advisory sticker. The duo unsurprisingly mines a notably fertile freely improvised seam, with the speed of their exchanges never exceeding their grasp of nuance.
Sentient Beings: Truth Is Not The Enemy (Discus 183CD)
Martin Archer’s Discus label is a labour of love similar to the two discussed above. Truth Is Not The Enemy by the quartet Sentient Beings – namely John O’ Gallagher on alto sax, Faith Brackenbury on violin and viola, John Pope on bass and Tony Bianco on drums – comes from that quarter and documents two live tracks of more orthodox free jazz, each in excess of half-hour duration. To an unusual degree the music is formed from the off, testament both to the group’s close camaraderie and to common notions of spontaneous form.
Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook: Star Quality – Speculations For Guitar And Voice (Discus Music 179CD)
Keir Cooper and Eleanor Westbrook’s Star Quality is another Discus release and in a way presents us with music for which the precedents are unusually few. The billing of “speculations for guitar and voice” doesn’t really do much to lessen a feeling of elusiveness, which may or may not be down to the use of the digital audio workstation as a writing tool. The line between the spontaneous and the predetermined seems unusually blurred, and the music’s intriguing enough to transcend the snapshot impression offered by this brief and largely failed attempt at describing it; come, say, December of this year my view of it might well be radically transformed.