Jazz Recap - February 2020

Artists covered: HILA * Jeff Parker * Jeremy Cunningham * Moses Boyd * The Heliocentrics

Welcome to my first ever Jazz music recap, this one for any releases over the course of January and February this year. I hope you enjoy...

"21"
HILA
7th February 2020

Underdog Records

Prepare yourself for pastures green and holographic, because this is the jazz of a post-everything world. On the duo's first collaborative album together, HILA pulls from the likes of techno, vaporwave, trap, oriental and neo-classical in a blaze of glory that encapsulates the chaos and diversity of the world we live in. Honestly, it's barely jazz anymore and I'm completely on board for this kind of album to shake things up to the point of breaking, especially when it's this good.

Announcing themselves with a blur of bass and controlled musical anarchism, album opener "Perfect Fifth" is an immediate and very direct introduction into the sort of bizarre soundscapes you will be subject to when listening to this album. It's by no means the tamest song on the album, but it's by no means the most wildly experimental track on the record. That would likely go to the mind-altering mess of "KhouanlePins", boldly pouring pools of genre into one sea of madness with striking strings, an almost traditional feel and a prominent drum machine skittering away and sounding just out of place enough to be weird and just in place enough to not feel unnecessary. Paired with a [technical term bloopy] techno synth and an insistent, chopped vocal sample, this is easily one of the most far-out "jazz" songs I've ever heard.

Even the most unremarkable and generic song on the album has instrumentation just as compelling as those weirder moments, "Something on the Ground" showing off its wistful-turned-oddly-celebratory strings and backing vocals as the guiding light through a fantastic yet repetitive track. By extreme contrast, the all over the place attitude of "Glendale Soul Train" is both a marvel and a pain to follow, the abundance of different sounds and textures at times becoming a little claustrophobic. Still, when you're in the right mood for it, this is another example of how HIRA flips the norm on its head to create something beautiful, perplexing and buckets of fun all at once.

Overall, I have to praise this album for its weirdness above all else, the unashamedly bold instrumentation taking it to unfamiliar ground that I was utterly blown away by. I have to admit, I do prefer the slightly more controlled passages where the chaos is perhaps turned down a notch, but that's not to discredit how thrilling an experience from front to back this album is.

8.5/10

Best Tracks: Perfect Fifth; KhouanlePins; Something on the Ground; Xash Song; 22

Worst Tracks: Take a Sip

"Suite for Max Brown"
Jeff Parker

24th January 2020

International Anthem

Parker's aim for this album was to move away from what he knew, to avoid his habits and tendencies. I'm no expert on his back-catalogue, but I vouch for the quality and spirit of this album.

From his daughter Ruby's soulful feature on the opening track, you might expect a classic sort of jazz record, one that is adventurous within the confines of the predetermined borders of the genre's oldschool sound. That is not the case whatsoever, as Jeff Parker pulls his post-rock influences from his band Tortoise as well as new experiments in psychedelia and even electronic music, something that I didn't even realise until I'd heard the album more than once due to how captivated and lost in the Afrobeat rhythms and abstract spirals of songs like "Fusion Swirl" and "Go Away", two tracks that my brain seems to have identified as the most memorable and, in the case of the former, the most accomplished song on the album.

The more times I make the dive into the Afro-Caribbean aesthetics of this record, the more I feel involved and like I'm listening to something from decades prior, like a window into the tropical jazz fusion that sounds as far from the cities as you could get. The synthesized elements then are integrated seamlessly amongst a beautiful brass section, and in general it's an album that makes a lot more sense knowing Parker's past as a DJ; he pulls sounds from such a variety of styles in the most natural feeling and yet urgent way, creating an undeniable mix of contrary styles that somehow mesh into what does sound like a more classic jazz record, at least at surface level.

Jeff Parker is a very busy man, and given his versatility and breadth of styles and direction over his long career, it's incredibly refreshing to hear him combining that variety into one incredibly cohesive and fulfilling release that has not only found a place in my heart but also on frequent rotation as one of my most listened to albums this year so far.

8.5/10

Best Tracks: Build a Nest; Fusion Swirl; Metamorphoses; Gnarciss; Go Away; Max Brown
Worst Tracks: 3 For L

"The Weather Up There"
Jeremy Cunningham

28th February 2020

Northern Spy

On his second album as a frontman, drummer Jeremy Cunningham pays tribute to his younger brother through emotional fusions of mournful, bluesy jazz with some outside-the-box musical decisions.

Assembling a "drum choir" of percussionists comprised by his friends and mentors, including Makaya McCraven, Mike Reid and Jeff Parker, Jeremy's vision of a thoughtful and retrospective album is fully realised in morbid technicolour. There are many interesting passages when Josh Johnson's saxophone takes the lead, and it's alongside the jazz wizard Jeff Parker on the song "Hike" that sees this album reach its peak in terms of psychedelic experimentation and a determined groove. It's a track that isn't burdened by the weighty spoken word passages that illustrate the devastating reality of Jeremy's brother Andrew's death.

I do think that these spoken word passages are a key part of making the album as emotional as possible, although I have to admit that they do halt the process of the album, and that perhaps they could have been spread out a little more as opposed to being so concentrated in one place for the sake of the flow, yet it would take away from the tragedy of these figures from Andrew's past talking about his death. "Elegy" is the best example of this, despite not featuring the same interesting synth elements that opener "Sleep" did, I feel like this track does a much better job of conveying how brutal and unnecessary that Andrew's murder was, highlighting the issues with gun control in America in the process and making for a terrifyingly raw moment backed by the cascading rhythms of the aforementioned drum choir.

Following this with the more integrated and poetic "Return These Tides" with Ben LaMar Gay delivering a beautiful soliloquy about Andrew, before the album is once again swept off its feet by the potency of Jeff Parker's contributions on the 7 minute title track that's lead by a looping synthesizer as what I suppose is a contemplative thinkpiece on the place Andrew is now, wherever that may be. After a couple of minutes, it morphs into a more satisfyingly off-kilter and fleshed out piece that I see as a kind of uncertain ascension, building on the theme of an afterlife and the unknown in one long deviation from a previously grounded experience. I'm not criticising the track so much as I'm commenting on it, as I do enjoy the overall atmosphere and once again psychedelic tendencies of the song, I just can't help thinking that the first two minutes would best be reduced given how repetitive and nonessential it feels after the track really picks up.

I'm pretty confident in calling this a very good album, and it's a shame I have to compare it with Jeff Parker's Suite For Max Brown simply because of how close together those releases came and due to Parker's contributions to The Weather Up There, but it just doesn't go quite as far in any direction to be as bold of an album. Of course, restraint is a key part in making this album work that I wouldn't want to take that away from it, but there's definitely less to latch onto.

7.5/10

Best Tracks: 1985; The Breaks; Hike; Elegy; Return These Tides
Worst Tracks: Sleep

"Dark Matter"
Moses Boyd

14th February 2020

Exodus Records

Somewhere between the concert hall and the dancefloor, Moses Boyd creates a jazz album influenced by the likes of grime, trip hop and electronica.

In my opinion, Boyd puts his best foot forward with the funky and bass-propelled "Stranger Than Fiction", a song that dominates the rest of the tracklist with its slow-burning, emphatic, mighty horns that lead the track from its humble beginnings to its powerful conclusion. It definitely sets the groundwork for an album steeped in electronics, the bombastic tendencies coming to light on frequent occasions of danceable grooves paired with guitar solos and phenomenal brass sections that on a song like "BTB" feel like a natural extension of the opener, seeing Moses take the sound in a linked yet more upbeat and rolicking direction.

That's the thing about Moses, he's able to find interesting new ways to take the already excellent concept of a dancefloor-ready jazz album, and he's not afraid to do this in an eclectic and dynamic way by using a vast array of instruments that all compliment the atmosphere. Always cohesive, always emphatic and always produced to perfection: this man knows his stuff. It's this knack for the familiar but unusual that lends itself perfectly to Moses' blend of a funk-oriented, clap-heavy beat that sits atop a gurgling bassline which is in turn poised over an EDM-style sub bass on the catchy standout "Shades of You", the first of two songs that feature prominent and fantastic vocals from Poppy Adjuda and Obongjayar respectively.

Perhaps the only criticism of this phenomenal album is how concise it is, and I'm not talking about the length of this record. Rather, I feel as though the freedom of the jazzy side of the album is somewhat constrained to the 4/4 rhythms due to the dance music direction that Moses takes. It would be great if he'd delivered a song that allows itself the space to wander outside of the sleek but occasionally claustrophobic production. Overall though, this is well worth your time, whether you're into jazz, grime, electronic or dance music.

8/10

Best Tracks: Stranger Than Fiction; BTB; Shades of You; Dancing in the Dark; What Now?

Worst Tracks: 2 Far Gone; Hard Food

"Infinity Of Now"
The Heliocentrics

14th February 2020

Madlib Invasion

What excites me about modern jazz music is that it's much harder to find any that's derivative of certain classic sounds anymore. Everything's a fusion with something, and given the growing niche that it occupies as a genre that's been unpopular and uncool for so long now, it's arguably one of the most consistently high quality areas of music out there. I'm at risk of sounding very pretentious if I don't already, so I'm just going to dive right into the review...

The Heliocentrics are a psychedelic jazz collective from London that have been around for a while, each musician having huge amounts of experience and experiments ready to unleash at an given moment. In collaboration, the band centres around the drummer Malcolm Catto, bassist Jake Ferguson, guitarist Adrian Owusu and multi-instrumentalist Jack Yglesias, although a prominent member of their latest record who cannot be overlooked is Slovakian singer Barbora Patkova, whose haunting vocals make a lot of these songs land in the way they do. Joining the group for the first time on 2017's A World Of Masks, her vocals add a whole new dimension to the band's music that both grounds the space-jazz, psych-funk chaos with an emotional and relatable core, delivered in an often unsettling and appropriately ghostly fashion.

Progressing through this album, I'm consistently impressed by how the intricate flourishes can develop into swirling storms of psychedelic bombast, whilst never losing the direction they opened with nor the space-aged, Martian jungle vibe that I interpret this whole record to be. It's a wonderful and colourful experience that drifts between its jazz and rock influences, never totally committing to one (which is a great thing, given how misdirected that would be). This is an album that honestly sounded more like Gorillaz early work from the opening track "99% Revolution" than any jazz band I've ever heard, and the increasingly experimental nature of this albums takes it from that jangly, offbeat sound into the harsh and almost grating "Elephant Walk" and onto the epic 10 minute closer "People Wake Up!", an emphatic display of a more conventional jazzy route that sees a vast array of horns and strings guiding out the album in an indulgent but essential victory lap of a song.

9/10

Best Tracks: 99% Revolution; Venom; Burning Wooden Ship; Light in the Dark; People Wake Up!

Worst Tracks: Nonsense, Pt. 1

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Thank you so much for reading my first ever jazz recap, this one's going to alternate each month with the electronic one as I want to focus on the best releases in those genres that I stumble across. They might be the styles I've covered the least on my blog in the past, although in 2020 they're the styles I've found to be the most consistently rewarding and adventurous.

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