Anders Filipsen Trio (AFT): Aldebar Nights Of Mangos (ILK368CD)
All four of the albums in this month’s round-up speak of the way in which the powerful forces of personality, intellect and innovation are constantly broadening and renewing the tradition. Like many of his fellow travellers at Copenhagen’s artist-led ILK Music, pianist Anders Filpsen’s interests span jazz, contemporary composition and the avant-garde. Yet whereas label mates Simon Toldam, Søren Kjærgaard and Matt Choboter tend towards the austerity of the late 50s New York school, Filipsen’s new trio with Casper Nyvang Rask (b) and Rune Lohse (d) follows a strikingly different path.
Describing the project as an intuitive take on classic jazz, Filipsen claims to have been inspired by pre-childhood memories of artists such as Zoot Sims played through headphones rested on his pregnant mother’s stomach. Recorded in August 2024 at John Fomsgaard’s studio on the Danish island of Møn, the trio basks in an evocative analogue warmth which on pieces like A Pale Man In A Dark Room and Monks Shuffli amplifies the unmistakable echoes of Ellington, Nichols and Monk. Dark And Plenty Of Sun adds fractured post-rock rhythms and a left hand worthy of Nancarrow to the mix, while Names Gone and Mayama fuse serialism and free balladry. The tense Smell Gasoline And Move and Candy are both packed with incident, and the trio even unearths fine nuances in the relatively static and somewhat ominous drone of Am The Boat Rockin’. A welcome fissure in the increasingly homogenised world of the jazz piano trio, AFT’s playfully subversive music frequently reminds me of Misha Mengelberg’s brilliant Who’s Bridge trio.
Ronny Graupe’s Szelest: Newfoundland Tristesse (BMC Records BMC324)
This Berlin-based trio shares a similarly oblique relationship to the past, parsing the classic tropes of the great American songbook and re-forming its component parts into something fresh and original. Graupe (elg) has been an active presence in the German capital’s creative music scene since the mid-90s, and along with relatively recent arrival Kit Downes (p) they’re the trio’s mischief makers in chief. Navigating her way through the rhythmic and harmonic vortices is Swiss-born vocalist Lucia Cadotsch, winner of the 2021 Deutscher Jazzpreis and co-founder of Speak Low with Otis Sandsjö and Petter Eldh. The trio’s free-flowing programme of standards and originals rarely follows a straight line.
Richard Williams’ typically informative liner notes reveal that in choosing the group’s name, a Polish onomatopoeia for “rustle”, Graupe had in mind the random patterns of disturbance of the wind moving through trees or the waves in the sea. Constantly creating and resolving musical tension, the outlines of the songs always remain visible, and Cadotsch’s crystalline voice retains its clarity and poise whatever else might be happening around her. Highlights include a sombre yet very tender reading of Some Other Time, Graupe and Downes’ dreamy guitar and celeste-like exchanges on Sublimity, the rhythmically buoyant gameplay of Vorbei, and an enchanting reworking of I Surrender Dear. At once classic and unfamiliar, Newfoundland Tristesse seems to form a convincing blueprint for the song-based jazz of the future.
Phil Haynes: Return To Electric (Corner Store Jazz CSJ 0149)
When in 2023 drummer-composer Phil Haynes announced the publication of a memoir and a three-year programme of releases, the arrival of the news was bittersweet. The prospect of new material was quickly tempered by the realisation that Haynes’ serious health ailments meant that the recordings might be his last. Fortunately, he continues to push his way through the pain barrier and as this electrifying September 2024 recording illustrates, his perennially adventurous music has lost none of its potency.
Conceptually Return To Electric is a homage to the first wave of jazz-rock fusion – think of Mahavishnu, Lifetime and Return To Forever – but as you’d probably expect, Haynes approaches the era from a very personal perspective. Joined by Steve Salerno (elg) and Drew Gress (b) in a reunion of the backline of album dedicatee Paul Smoker’s Notet, together they tackle music from Corea, McLaughlin, Shorter and George Russell, along with five Haynes originals and three fascinating improvised cadenzas.
Salerno’s visceral lead on McLaughlin’s Spectrum is counterbalanced by a softer presence on Corea’s Crystal Silence, McLaughlin’s Lotus On Irish Springs and Haynes’ Paul / Christian, where his tone recalls late-period Abercrombie. Russell’s Living Time is short and spiky, buoyed by a heavy Elvin-esque backbeat, while the trio’s thrill-a-minute take on Shorter’s Paraphernalia ventures into the type of semi-abstract territory that Haynes and Gress have revelled in over the years. An intriguing glimpse of how jazz-rock might have evolved had it pursued freedom over virtuosity, there’s much to enjoy here.
Phil Haynes & Ben Monder: Transition(s) (Corner Store Jazz CSJ 0148)
The other panel in Haynes’ electric diptych is this December 2023 meeting with Ben Monder, veteran of over 200 recordings as a sideman and very much a part of Haynes’ world when he arrived in New York in the 90s. Although Monder has performed with the drummer many times, this is their first recording together. Both share a longstanding fascination with Coltrane’s posthumous 1970 release Transition, and as Haynes’ commentary reveals, they used to spend hours in his Brooklyn Corner Store improvising on the album’s modal blues-based title track before heading up the street to Joe’s Pizza for lunch.
The track forms the ecstatic centrepiece of an otherwise downtempo and slow-burning set, and although barely a third of the length of Coltrane’s beautifully sprawling original it has the same phosphorescent energy. Haynes is typically propulsive, while Monder creates a spectral haze of delayed and distorted sound, into which Coltrane’s theme gradually disappears. Elsewhere Monder deploys chasms of reverb and delay in an atmospheric series of post-ambient soundscapes. The cover of I Fall In Love Too Easily recalls the dreamy late 70s ECM sounds of Frisell and Torn, Haynes carefully judging each accent and allowing the spaces to speak. The album is dedicated to another of Haynes’ lost comrades, Herb Robertson, and I think the idiosyncratic trumpeter would approve of the duo’s thoughtful reimaginings of history.
