The Third Stream Quartet: Déja Vu (Jersika Records JRA 027-001-1000)
Most of the records made by Latvian company Jersika, the jazz and improvised-music label founded by Mareks Ameriks in 2017, are made completely analogue and eventually cut directly to lacquer. But even those that go through the digital process are, the company says, carefully mastered to preserve a warmth of sound.
The current album bears that out. Moreover, it demonstrates Jersika’s flair and enterprise, in having arisen from an offer made by Ameriks to the saxophonist Indriķis Veitners to record with a band in which he plays clarinet, not sax, and without a drummer or any other percussion. The result is a successful collaborative effort incorporating compositions by vibraphonist Ēriks Miezis and themes by Veitners which he claims to have dreamt.
The central work is Miezis’s Third Stream Suite in three movements, which has, like the other charts on the album, the precision of notated music subverted by the quality of extemporisation.
Magnus Bakken: Slackline (Losen LOS 311-2)
Self-fulfilling prophecy dictates that the influence of Jan Garbarek has probably been felt as much in Norway as in the rest of Scandinavia and beyond. Tenor saxophonist Magnus Bakken is a case in point, a musician with the power and grace of jazz’s other ample-toned tenormen but whose fusion mindset on this latest album also invokes the lyrical and the ethereal.
This is certainly true of three personal charts: the playful Dzje (written for his daughter), For All Those Years (penned in memory of his grandmother) and In July (a lament, with rumbling, quietly attentive percussion, for a stillborn child).
The band consists of Bakken (doubling EWI on one track and percussion), Jørn Øien on keyboards, bassist Bo Berg, drummer Amund Kleppan, and percussionist Snorre Bjerck on the first four of the seven tracks, all of them Bakken compositions. It’s a quartet that matches Bakken the trailblazer in its capacious sound, galvanised by Øien’s sustaining chords and, on most of the charts, the thumping impact of conjoined drumming and percussion.
Hiromi: Out There (Concord/Telarc LP7267044, CD7267043)
At the start of Hiromi’s second album with her Sonicwonder band, the spirit is revived of Dastardly and Muttley in manic pursuit of Yankee Doodle Pigeon. The fun openers of XYZ – a reworking of her first recorded chart in 2003 – and Yes! Ramen!!, which is a portrait of her band homing in on places where they can eat their favourite food, are coöperative headlong rushes, with non-stop assault on the keyboard by the leader, running ostinati, and a sense of the musical means being more important than the ends.
It’s also a given that the all-action Japanese pianist in over 20 years has boosted jazz as a breathtaking live art form. Out There is a studio recording – her 13th – and a follow-up to this band’s Sonicwonderland album – but one that often approaches the high-wire riskiness of public performance. It’s a band consisting of Hiromi, trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, drummer Gene Coyne, and bassist Hadrien Feraud. Michelle Willis provides the vocal on the cool, decelerated Pendulum.
At the core is the album’s eponymous four-movement suite that recalls established styles, including funky-fusion and anthem-like synth rock. But there’s no style quite like the catch-as-catch-can rush of the first two tracks.
Mike Majkowski: August and November (Gusstaff Records, GRAM 2419 and GRAM 2420)
Marc Johnson’s solo album Overpass (ECM, 2021) was an example of a jazz bassist doing things with his instrument that weren’t that far away from the jazz milieu; Berlin-domiciled Australian bassist Mike Majkowski does things with his in these two albums that are moving into and occupying the minimalist zones of contemporary music.
Yet the four tracks on August for acoustic bass – with their repetitive pulse employing drone, single pizzicato notes dropped at slightly variable intervals and thrummed staccato – display both a harmonic and a motor function, which is what the instrument performs in jazz. This needs to be said, because this is a jazz magazine. What is not expected of the jazz listener, though, is appreciation of the almost microscopic changes undergone by these ingredients and the need to explore them – well, microscopically. Don’t be fooled by the titles; or be fooled (or inspired), as the case may be. The first track, Shine, does have the scorching persistence of a hot summer’s day.
On November, there are just two 14-minute tracks for electric guitar, which, in their umbilical connection, offer almost 30 minutes of repeated cadences split in half. The same infinitesimal variations are present as in August. It’s a hypnotic experience of jazz’s unexplored regions.
