Dave Adewumi: The Flame Beneath The Silence
Trumpeter Adewumi comes with endorsements from the likes of pianist Jason Moran, a musician whose first album had the late Sam Rivers in the line-up. This Adewumi album is reflective of the post-bop/free-bop milieu that those names will suggest to readers in the know, and also indicative of a strong musical future for the leader, whose work throughout is nothing if not reflective of a missing link between Booker Little, who during his sadly brief career was far more fluent in the post-bop field than he was ever acclaimed for, and the outer limits as charted by Bill Dixon.
Overall, the music has an airy yet grounded feel, an impression lent substance in no small part by the work of Joel Ross, whose approach to the vibraphone, while lacking the uncompromising singularity of Walt Dickerson, often veers towards the impressionistic, as on Abandon where the sum total of its effect, combined with Adewumi’s animated yet reflective lines, is that of a kind of 21st century chamber music at odds with the strain of the same embodied by the Kris Davis release covered below.
Being the lengthiest pieces on the album If I Need To Do This Again I’m Going To Throw A Fit and The Light You Left Behind unsurprisingly afford the group the best opportunities to show what they’re capable of in terms of both each individual’s intuitive understanding of the others and the characteristics they bring to the music. The latter are exemplified by Linda May Han Oh’s use of the bow and Marcus Gilmore’s colourations on the opening of the former and the leader’s limpid yet focused work on the latter, a piece which for this writer comes as close to the many precedents as anything here.
Discography
The Flame Beneath The Silence; Is; Abandon; Breach The Gap; Infinite Loop; Pensive; The Vine; Out Cry; If I Need To Do This Again I’m Going To Throw A Fit; The Light You Left Behind (46.00)
Adewumi (t); Joel Ross (vib); Linda May Han Oh (b); Marcus Gilmore (d). Ornithology, Brooklyn, New York, 6-7 July 2024.
Giant Step Arts GSA 19
Kris Davis & The Lutoslawski Quartet: The Solastalgia Suite
It’s entirely apt that the quartet working with pianist and composer Davis on this album is named after the Polish composer of what might be regarded as a seminal late 20th century string quartet, because what we have here is a work of 21st century chamber music shot through with an improviser’s sensibility and a composer’s ear for detail.
The philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with the term “solastalgia” to define a feeling of homesickness provoked by a world changing under pressure from the density of human activity, and that feeling is evoked here. Thus the opening Interlude balances a strain of anxiety with the deft use of space, the result being music far removed from the jazz tradition yet in a way brought to fruition not least because of knowledge and appreciation of its more demanding strands.
An Invitation To Disappear balances piano and strings in a kind of knowing accord, and while the resulting music again has little in common with any widely acknowledged notion of jazz, it does provoke reflection and indeed stimulate in a way that marks its individuality. When Davis does play solo (briefly) it’s in a manner entirely in keeping with the music’s demands, rather than in an attempt at evoking jazz notions.
The sobriety of Ghost Reefs is compliant with notions of ecological disaster that the title suggests. Muted anxiety is a mark of proceedings, and understandably so, while the scurrying strings of Pressure & Yield come as some kind of contrast and hint at a world in which efforts to avoid such a disaster are undertaken with no little urgency.
Discography
Interlude; An Invitation To Disappear; Towards No Earthly Pole; The Known End; Ghost Reefs; Pressure & Yield; Life On Venus; Degrees Of Separation (44.46)
Davis (p); Roksana Kwasnikowska, Marcin Markowicz (vn); Artur Rozmylowicz (vla); Maciej Mlodowski (clo). No dates or locations.
Pyroclastic Records
Bjorn Meyer: Convergence
I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that the ECM label has for quite some time been “curated” to the point where the back catalogue is overseen to ensure that none of its more challenging past releases ever get reissued – the object being to place the label as some jazz industry approximation of the coffee-table book – while the majority of its new releases serve the purpose of gilding the brand as an embodiment of everything restrained, tasteful and “perfectly” recorded.
If the resulting music is considered to be the more limpid, impressionistic face of contemporary jazz then this album of six-string electric bass guitar solos is right on the money. Throughout the programme, at least as far as I can hear, the emphasis is on the atmospheric at the expense of the substantial, the polite at the expense of the animated. Consequently the divide between the background and the foreground is rarely if ever bridged, with the emphasis firmly on the former.
Thus, thanks in no small part to Manfred Eicher’s by now entrenched production values, the calm of Hiver, the sparse opening of which evokes somewhat hackneyed notions of beauty, stays firmly in the background, the music of an untroubled soul aimed at souls for whom “spiritual calm” need not come in any more substantial form.
The minimalism of Motion is punctuated by some relatively vigorous strumming, but the repeated figure which is essentially the core of the piece is deployed largely only as an end in itself, and the negligible variations upon it don’t stray too far. Of course, repetition is often utilised in a way that serves the cause of stimulating listening. Here, however, the production serves only to ensure that the process never takes off.
Discography
Convergence; Hiver; Drift; Gravity; Motion; On Hope; Rewired; Magnetique; Nesodden (37.58)
Meyer (b). Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich, September 2024.
ECM 2844
