Jan Gunnar Hoff Group: Voyage (Losen Records LOS 304-2)
Norwegian Jan Gunnar Hoff’s model of Scandi-fusion sends sparks off the rails for this album, with a quartet whose members constitute what popsters might call a supergroup. Any high-octane foursome with Gary Husband boiling away at the kit is obliged to deliver (on one track he also overlays a keyboard contribution); Hoff’s long-time associate Per Mathisen, on acoustic and electric bass, maintains the pedigree with stress-resistant lines; and French guitarist Nguyên Lê is in a high-flying inspiration.
The four produce the kind of integrated and fertile amalgam that can only come from having worked together, which is what the JGHG began doing in Europe in 2023. After concerts in Norway a year later, Hoff was invited by Losen Records’ Odd Gjelsnes to anoint the foursome in the recording studio (Oslo’s Propeller Music Division under the excellent Michael Hartung).
It’s all come together nicely with six compositions by Hoff, three by Nguyên, two by Husband, and a quirky arrangement of Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings by Mathisen.
Now and then, the band’s power source is taken down some to accommodate sentiments not normally associated with few-holds-barred jazz-rock. For example, Hoff’s The Fjords adopts ballad mode in homage to “pristine nature constantly under pressure”, though its dreamy complexion doesn’t admit the rage and militancy that now drives many activists. It’s no less keenly felt, though.
Husband is in active-volcano mode for his Spirit Be, a pumped-up chart in which the super-active percussion variants seem to delineate the music’s shape, out of which spring bass, then piano, then Nguyên’s magisterial flights. They do even more so on his Ancestors, guiding the music to heroic levels.
The JGHG is a consummate group, knowing exactly when and where to moderate its fire power.
The Furgos: Retrospective (Furgo Music LLC UPC -195269344399)
According to Texan husband-and-wife musicians Jeff and Jeanette Furgo, the greatness of the Great American Songbook might be extended beyond not only Broadway and Hollywood but also to any place where the music has made what they call “a cultural impact”. Their view highlights the jazz musician’s current tendency to borrow discreetly from the pop canon but not pillage often and indiscriminately.
On this album, the trawl of a dozen tracks includes Wonderful World, Bad Moon Rising, Light My Fire, and Holding Back The Years. One supposes that their merits as candidates for “standard” status depend on what their interpretations as jazz vehicles sound like.
Singer Jeanette and pianist Jeff have assembled a sextet that will give it a go: they are joined by saxophonist Aaron Irwinsky on tenor and soprano, drummer Joseph Carpenter and bassist Henry Beal. There are a couple of instrumentals but the tracks are typically defined by the capacious voice of Jeanette, with its formidable vibrato and flawless diction.
The sample charts listed above indicate that the original recordings might be thought of as definitive. Joe Jackson’s Steppin’ Out had a bounciness that’s lost in the Furgos version, and the sentiment of Carole King’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? is interpreted by Jeanette in a way that makes one wonder if the tender self-questioning of Gerry Coffin’s lyrics is preferred to the sceptical and less rhetorical, more hands-on-hips, enquiry we get here.
A few of the numbers are noisily self-indulgent, but the band, following Jeanette’s example, don’t hold back. The Furgos have led the way. They deserve credit for that, if only to make us wonder what, say, a Brad Mehldau trio would make of Take The Money And Run. Not that the cultural impact of Take The Money And Run has been all that impressive.
Becca Wilkins: Rêverie (Lamplight Social Records LSRCD 36)
French chansons – as opposed to French mélodies, or art songs – are generally post-war Gallic pop. But, unlike the art songs of France and Germany, they are often set to more convincing, if demotic, lyrics.
Singer Becca Wilkins and her trio of pianist Olly Chalk, bassist Sam Ingvorsen, and drummer Billy Pod understand probably the most important aspect of re-presenting them: their proximity to a cabaret tradition and the closeness of that tradition to the intimacy of a jazz setting in a country whose enthusiasm for jazz, at least in its metropolitan centres, is renowned.
Wilkins, who once lived in Normandy and studied music and French at university, pays close attention to the words and music of 11 charts, one of them – Marguerite Monnot’s Hymne À L’Amour to words by Edith Piaf – split into an album intro and finale. She also arranged all the music. Her attentiveness results in these tunes being reborn. She artfully dodges the temptation of careering in the wake of famous versions: Charles Trenet’s La Mer, for instance, which in her version has neither the urbane delivery of Trenet himself (he wrote the words and the music) nor the later upbeat version of Bobby Darin.
Icons such as Trenet and Piaf stand sentinel beside these songs. One of the most imposing is Charles Aznavour, who wrote words and music for Emmenez-Moi, and composed La Bohème, to words by Jacques Plante. How wonderful to hear Django Reinhardt’s Nuages with lyrics by Jacques Larue.
Wilkins is unfazed by the achievements of her forebears and in this genre and on this album she’s graduated to the premier league.
