Europe Jazz Media Chart - October 2021

Cole has selected some of the most adventurous and exciting players from his Birmingham hometown to present a compelling exploration of what jazz means to him, paying tribute to his influences while creatively re-combining them, so the lush arrangement of Dameron’s swing-to-bop ‘On A Misty Night’ is spiced with Soweto Kinch’s Dolphy-esqe alto and Reuben James’ floridly romantic piano, Monk’s ‘Played Twice’ is pulled and stretched towards freedom by the virtuosic rhythm section, and Woody Shaw’s ‘Zoltan’ is tackled with a fearless abandon that recalls the spirit of Ornette’s classic quartets. Cole manages to convey his deeply felt reverence for the forebears without seeming overwhelmed: ‘Blues Connotation’ demonstrates how he uses his influences as a launchpad for some genuinely thrilling flights of invention, while Jay Phelps’ nimble, accurate trumpet provides the perfect foil for the leaders’ wide-ranging expressiveness. The wildly inventive bare-bones tenor trio reading of ‘What’s New’ displays a level of unaffected sincerity that’s rare in contemporary UK jazz. This is one of the most exciting releases of the year, brimming with potential.

The Danish trio with bassist Jonas Westergaard, pianist Søren Kjærgaard and drummer Peter Bruun have previously released a record together as Jonas Westergaard Trio, namely the critically acclaimed «Helgoland». It was a project commissioned by Danmarks Radio, and featured excellent soloists in a larger ensemble. This time they have "stripped" the format to be only piano, bass and drums, even though the three compositions were written for a septet, and performed at the Serious Series Festival in Berlin in 2013 for the first time. Westergaard, Kjærgaard and Bruun are three of Denmark's most exciting jazz performers. They have their own careers, and it was Bruun who was the initiator of the three to play together as a trio. We are getting three compositions, "Light / Light", "Positions" and "Värmland", and all the way it is thoughtful, meditative and extremely beautiful music. In the opening track, thoughts are drawn to classical, romantic composers, coupled with a freer piano jazz, which has a lot of Bill Evans in it, although the musical expression is much more modern than Evans ever performed. And if you include the finest and most "complicated" parts of Keith Jarrett's piano art, you approach Kjærgaard's way of playing. Westergaard is well placed in the soundscape, and is the one who «decides the action», while Bruun's drumming is brilliant. The second track, has a slightly different temperature. It starts more aggressively, but calms down after a while. Westergaard plays here with the bow at the beginning, but also visits "regular" finger play, and the music is much more rhythmically complex than the first track. The main theme is played once, before we get nine variations of the same rhythmic form in different lengths and formations. Somewhere in the middle of the composition, they open up the rhythmic, where the three improvise relatively free, before moving again into the rhythmic forms. The last track, is almost romantic, at least in the beginning. It's almost like they play an improvisation over the sweedish folk  song "Ach, Värmland du sköna", before the Swedish landscape spreads out and we get a Danish interpretation of the Swedish landscape, almost close to what piano colleague Simon Toldam does on the album "Tak for dit brev» (ILK, 2020). But here I think the three are attacking Swedish nature in a slightly different way. Kjærgaard's piano playing can also here be connected to Evans and Jarrett, but is still very personal. And some of the phrases he delivers are picked up by Westergaard who put them into the bass comp. There are records like this that make listening intensely to good jazz to be a great experience. What happens between the musicians, what they really "talk" about, how they take a small theme and spread it to become something completely different and exciting, and that it is possible to be so close to each other musically without have written everything down on notes. "Positions / Positions" has become a beautiful, creative, exciting and extremely audible recording, which shows that three good friends can do much more exciting things when they meet after a long time than sitting in a pub, bragging about what they have done since last time they met. And here we get three compositions that are played, turned upside down, explored and analyzed by three excellent musicians. A record that will be high on the list when this year's favorites are to be selected!

In the pandemic times creating forced isolation and seclusion, some went nuts and while Paris based Italian pianist Giovanni Mirabassi went notes... Romantic and always Evansesque, Mirabassi performed the subtle soundtrack of our quarantines with a solo piano.

This is a brilliant album that presents 'bassist, vocalist, composer, environmentalist and now solo artist' Ruth Goller's imaginative arrangements for voices and electric bass. In this she is ably supported by fellow vocalists, Lauren Kinsella and Alice Grant. Together they create quite unique textures of sound that are quite unlike anything I have heard. As the press material says: "On ‘Skylla’, Goller in some ways returns to the pure untaught instincts that drove her as a teen punk musician. Working with different tunings for each song, Goller composes instinctively based on what she hears in every moment. As Goller puts it, 'at that point muscle memory doesn’t work anymore so I have to trust my ear completely'."

Another demonstration that improvised music takes on its full meaning in concert. This live performance from March 2020, recorded in Vienna, ranks pianist Craig Taborn among the greatest of the time. His technical mastery is phenomenal and allows him all the audacities, all the structures and all the forms. One goes through many atmospheres but the most exciting are those where a sort of rotating mechanism drags the listener into a vortex. The seven pieces of the concert/disc then form a world of their own, whose minerality is blunted by the strength of the silences.

“Despite its ascetic approach, "Overpass" is an intense listening experience.” (Georges Tonla Briquet)

How wonderfully they play! This is not only real improvised jazz, but also a sophisticated arrangement, improvisational freedom and excellent teamwork.