Anders Hagberg: With Hope (Prophone Records PCD 369)
Swedish flautist Anders Hagberg’s latest album is described as “a poignant and timely response to a world in turmoil”. So, it might be expected to reflect at least some of the militancy of activists who chuck confetti on to Wimbledon tennis courts and sit down in the middle of busy main roads.
Not a bit of it. Hagberg’s quartet, despite bringing a carload of sonic possibilities to the studio, goes mainly for mildly animated self-control and contemplation. In terms of pondering a world gone to pot with wars and climate change, that might come across as despair. But Hagberg’s sadness at what’s going on would not necessarily incorporate anger or frustration in its compendium of response but instead express what’s left as wonderful in a wonderful world.
In any case, his collaborations with Shakti and Marilyn Mazur, for examples, mean he’s not restricted to undemonstrative gestures. If these light, beautifully crafted performances of original compositions and restructured folk melodies say anything about our cosmic plight, it’s that we have to stay sane.
Hagberg alone employs alto, bass, concert and Matusi flutes, soprano sax, and therapeutic Singing Bowl; bassist Johannes Lundberg vocals and synths; pianist Joona Toivanen prepared piano and synths; and drummer Helge Andreas Norbakken sundry percussion. They are therefore determined to use up a full if subdued palette, and its not sarcastic to say of a band seeking exposure in a jazz magazine that only a few charts are what one would call “jazzy”: the crepuscular Ruins, led into a warmer jazz feeling by Toivanen; With Hope, with its sforzando thuds behind Hagberg’s soprano sax; and Woods In Blue, fuelled by one of Lundberg’s many repeated bass figures. The first two, with Evening Hymn, are inspired by Ukrainian chorales, and Arctic Call, with its icy lamentation, draws on an Inuit drum song.
There’s a sense in which Hagberg’s hesitant flights are chaperoned by his colleagues as they run through a catalogue of accompanying resonances, and the four wander cautiously through some musical blasted heaths.
Ineza: Ibuka (Ineza Music INEZA01CD)
One of the virtues of an impressive début jazz album is the evidence of investment and commitment by all the musicians, especially where one of them is first among equals.
The singer Ineza was born in Rwanda and came to Britain via Belgium. On this, her first album as leader and songwriter – “ibuka” is Bantu Kinyarwandan for “remember” – she reflects on matters of background and identity with measures of relaxed tranquillity but no want of strength or purpose.
The album maps a geographical journey in personal terms that includes a memorial to her late adoptive mother, Francine DeClercq. Its star quality, though, lies mostly in the way her quartet of Michael Lack (alto sax), Rob Brockway (piano), Ben Crane (bass) and Kuba Miazga (drums) share the musical voyage as though it were theirs too.
Song For My Mother is possibly the prime example of how this empathy works: an instrumentally subdued arrangement acknowledges emotions delivered from the heart, the follow-on solos by Crane and then Brockway keeping a steadfast path. Silence is similar, and typical of a suite of finely wrought songs with something to say.
The Ineza voice, a disciplined but expressive instrument sinuously and meaningfully wrapping itself around the lyrics, is there from the opening Another Time, a rolling, stop-rhythm chart. On Waking Up Hungry, the busy Miazga demonstrates how to keep a tune on the move, as he does everywhere else, and Ineza launches a crescendo that gives the song’s subject a deeper etch. In similar manner, Grow twice modulates to a more emphatic rise in volume.
These songs are gleefully received gifts for the other musicians. Kwibuka is solemn personal creed, the voice almost reduced to speech, the processional mood sustained. Lending a song, any song, dignity is not the least of Ineza’s qualities.
Greg Murphy: Snap Happy (Whaling City Sound WCS 144)
Without a median line running unbroken through the dips and peaks of the jazz continuum, there’d be fewer anchor points for us to assess what’s frivolous and what’s here to stay.
New York-based pianist Greg Murphy is happy to occupy that horizontal where we get our bearings. Happiness is not a description chosen flippantly, either: the opening chart on this quartet album, On Green Dolphin Street, is taken at a joyful tempo, and that’s characteristic of the rest, give or take differences in what each track offers for interpretation.
The departures include a pair of Murphy originals, Equality and Proximity, set cheek-by-jowl and clearly a linguistic conjunction as much as a musical one. The first is off the blocks with Tatumesque skittering, which ushers in some free impro, its borderless but restrained feeling mirrored in the second.
Traditional exuberance is never far away. On the title track, another Murphy composition, the band gets so involved that the gleeful collectivity goes on a tad too long. That track, too, enjoys a richness of texture brought about by a switch to electronics – Murphy’s keyboard, Obasi Akoto’s bass, and, as on two other tracks, the guitar of Mark Whitfield, who gives Lenny White’s The Shadow Of Lo an acid edge.
That more ample sound is a feature of George Duke’s Geneva, gilded by Sy Smith’s vocalese, which might have been employed to advantage elsewhere. Chick Corea’s Humpty Dumpty is a merry-go-round, powered significantly here by Akoto’s electric bass; his acoustic solo on I Fall In Love Too Easily is a pleasing contribution to a chart on which Murphy’s harmonically subdued progress is showered with right-hand filigree.
The trading with drummer Steve Johns on Wayne Shorter’s Twelve More Bars To Go is acknowledgement of how much Johns’s kit and percussion contribute to the overall cheerful tone. The band has fun with Thelonious Monk, delivering Pannonica as an uptempo bossa nova, and trying to make Monk’s Mood (composed jointly with Walter Fuller) behave itself. The final All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm romps along with the album’s keynote exuberance and ends with a not unexpected Scotch snap.
