Europe Jazz Media Chart - February 2021

First, let's heap all the praise and the thanks we possibly can onto Moonjune Records proprietor and hero Leonardo Pavkovic, because he deserves it. What he has done for the legacy of UK jazz is incredible. Go to the Bandcamp page for this album and the work that has gone into this project is plain to see: an incredibly detailed sleeve note…an interview…facts, facts and yet more facts. Leonardo’s drive and energy achieve so much, notably getting the current Soft Machine line-up to do more than 50 concerts on the 2018-2019 Hidden Details world tour, including their first American dates since the 1970s. On this live album recorded by Soft Works in 2003 we find Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and John Marshall, but the man of the moment is Allan Holdsworth. Our reviewer for LJN, John Bungey, describes him as “ the thinking man’s guitar hero” and writes: “He combines the rock guitarist’s love of volume and attack with jazz harmony. Flurries of notes swoop and soar in dramatic crescendos. Unlike some wielders of new tech, he plays his cutting-edge SynthAxe guitar with taste as well as skill and, crucially, he usually knows when it’s time to stop.”

If you are a sucker for clean guitar sounds this is it! Acoustic and electric from the highest shelf recorded a couple of years ago. The duo blends influences from both the American continents. Their skills are monstrous, but they never fall into the swamp of pyrotechnical show off. It’s all about music and feeling.

Maria Kannegaard is a Norwegian jem. The lastest album of the trio she forms with the fantastic Ole Morten Vågan (bass) and Thomas Strønen (drums) is brilliant and dark in the same time. Her personal and professional path has been marked by psychological troubles, but on this "Sand i En Vik" she's keeping the music extremely fresh and clear. The compositions are filled with such a delicate musical sense of tension and balance. The improvisations make you dive into darkness. After a somewhat sharp opening, all the songs and melodies will seduce you: they won't leave your head once you've heard them. Minimalist, cinematic but never cheesy: each notes is felt inside her bones and soul. Remarkable!

Vibraphone whiz Bernard Maseli has been active on the Polish jazz scene for three and a half decades playing with various (mostly fusion) constellations, including Walk Away, The Globetrotters, Colors, Laboratorium. He has recorded more than 60 albums, but “Drifter,” suprisingly enough, is his first album under his own name. Relased by Warner Music Poland as part of the series Polish Jazz Masters, it is available only in digital form. Each of the record’s eleven tracks features a different lineup, a different idea and a different stylistic option – fusion, rock, blues, r & b, funk, hip-hop and world music, showcasing Maseli’s melodic invention, rhythmic zest, his incredible instrumental skills on vibraphone, marimba, kalimba, balaphon, MalletKAT... Nearly 30 musicians, instrumentalists and vocalists, have taken part in this endeavor, including international stars such as saxophonist Eric Marienthal, guitarist Dean Brown and bassist Linley Marthe.

A Russian-Estonian avant jazz rock quartet co-led by sax player Alexey Kruglov and guitarist Jaak Sooäär offers a tribute to Arsenal, Soviet Union's pioneering jazz rock fusion band which was extensively touring the USSR in 1970s and 80s. This tough, intriguing, and quirky album is dedicated to the 85th birthday of Alexey Kozlov, the Russian alto sax player who still leads Arsenal (in its 4th or 5th incarnation) nearly 50 years after founding it in Moscow. None of the Kruglov - Sooäär quartet member ever played with Arsenal, but they listened to the famed Soviet band as teenagers; the more curios the results.

The new quartet of multilingual German-Afghani vocalist Simin Tander, Swiss-Swedish electric bass guitarist Björn Meyer, Tunisian violinist Jasser Haj Youssef and Swiss drummer Samuel Rohrer from Berlin form a remarkable force field of igniting, merging and amplifying energies, temperaments and temperatures. Tander provides 12 compositions here and three times lyrics of her own, a mature achievement of class. Tander’s voice fluctuating between faith and yearning, joy and grief, loss and thankfulness, oriental and occidental spheres, carries these sentiments into the great reach of her touching singing lines. Her voice displays the typical merge of low and high, dark and light side of it, which is characteristic for great southern and eastern singers. She deploys this as calmly as intensely in long curving lines and its widely falling shadows - time after time into every new rhythmical cycle of tension and release. This reveals especially through the piano-less context and prospers through the subtle and forceful playing of her extraordinary fellow musicians. All poems (except one traditional lullaby) appearing in her 15 songs have been written by female poets, offering a rare glimpse onto female Pashto poetry (Nazo Tokhin (1670), Sohayla Hazrat-Nazim (2020)) as well as featuring a poem by Sylvia Plath (1961) and Gabriela Mistral (1922). There are also the lyrics of a song by female Afghan singer Gulnar Begum from the 1960s (from the movie “Baagh”) and the lyrics of a folk lullaby musically reworked by Manuel de Falla (1914). It is quite a range in chronologic and geographic terms that the album unites in a masterfully coherent way. To end the album then with Robert Zimmerman’s “The Times They Are a-Changing” (1964) is a surprising as well as speaking unifying choice. Simin Tander can be praised for her independent spirit, that produced this felicitous daring musical step forward.