Europe Jazz Media Chart - May 2020

This is a debut album by an all-female group of young up-and-coming Polish musicians, a leaderless collective O.N.E. Quintet featuring: Monika Muc - as, Paulina Atmańska - p, Dominika Rusinowska - viol, Kamila Drabek - b, and Patrycja Wybrańczyk - dr. The name of the band has a graceful twist – it implies they are a tight-knit unit playing as one, but pronounced in Polish, it means „they” (in feminine gender). The track list includes five originals written by the members of the group, a traditional folk tune and a haunting Komeda ballad „Niekochana”, which was unearthed by saxophonist Maciej Obara as the title tune on his recent ECM album „Unloved”. „One” is an exceptional debut, full of graceful melodies, changing moods and textures, inspired interplay, delicacy and fire.

Produced by singer Diana Polenova, this album features 18 yound singers, aged 7 to 20. What they sing are songs known to millions of Russian speakers, as the album is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of popular Russian rock band Mashina Vremeni (The Time Machine.) Pianist Evgeny Borets arranged 12 Time Machine songs and masterfully backed the young singers with his jazz trio (bassists Sergey Vassiliev and Sergey Khutas, drummer David Tkebuchava).

Lukasz Ojdana has an exceptional sense for capturing mood, atmosphere, temper and world feel musically in a few economical strokes of inconspicuous clarity, great lightness and pure, trustful beauty as well as self-evident depth. His way of adapting folk melodies and re-contextualize those, of balancing the personal and the inherited is of unparalleled consistency, atmospheric weight and subliminal attraction. Reason enough to nominate his album this month for the charts again.

This release has been in the pile for a while before it finally surfaced. Jazz and “Oriental music” may seem incompatible entities, but in this case New York based Anni Chen manages to spice up a seemingly jazzy outfit, in terms of instruments and approach, with traditional Chinese compositional devises and songs from Taiwan or Mongolia. The result is appealing and interesting without being weird. Chen is born in Beijing and has been into funk and soul besides straight-ahead and free jazz. Her octet consists of musicians of different nationalities, who are deeply into her music and convey her ideas impeccably. This is global world music if anything. Some listeners (who have English as their first language) may be turned off by Chen’s pronounced Chinese accent, which makes her English pronunciation slightly unclear; but the lyrics are printed in the booklet – those sung in Chinese are printed in Chinese (probably a clever market strategy). The improvisations are not based on the traditional jazz-cadenzas because Chen’s compositions and arrangements are different. That is the challenge and the attraction for the listener.

Time to wake up ! Black Music Matters and Irreversible Entanglements is here to say it loud and proud. And "The Code Noir", the opening piece, has the bitter taste of an unbearable past...