#Chamber Jazz

[haveyouheardthisband]

[iamlisteningto]

Dawn Richard And Spencer Zahn’s Pigments

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

Baghon Main • Diya Hai • Inayaat • Last Night • Mohabbat • Saans Lo • Suroor

Spotify ♪ Bandcamp ♪ YouTube

[burlveneer-music]

ALAWARI - Leviathan - dynamic classical-inflected jazz from Danish sextet

Danish instrumental collective ALAWARI was founded in 2016, and rapidly garnered a name for themselves on the European jazz scene for their explosive live performances, going on to win Denmark’s Young Jazz competition in the same year. A contrast to their eponymous 2022 debut - a cacophonous musical reflection of revolution - their upcoming release is an exploration of spirituality, transformation, and the totality of the human experience. ‘Leviathan’ is set to release on November 1st on April Records. Leviathan oscillates between symphonic grandeur and intimate vulnerability, with moments so delicate that every breath can be felt. In this way, the sextet aims to demonstrate that the path to the divine is found through collective unity—a shared experience that transcends the individual. Despite being a six piece, the ensemble’s sound feels comparable to that of an orchestra or big band, combining through-composed classical-influenced orchestration, intricate interlocking parts, lush waves of texture and a warm, raw, intimate production style to craft a larger-than-life listening experience. Leviathan embarks on a profound journey, capturing the divine and spiritual forces that permeate the arts. The album serves as a vessel—slowly navigating like a majestic ship or a steadfast train, embarking on a peaceful yet powerful crusade. It invites listeners to traverse a landscape of sorrow and joy, pain and exaltation, silence and intensity. Through this journey, ALAWARI aims to reveal the primordial truth: that the spirit precedes all, and that the mundane backdrop of everyday life can be transformed and painted anew, if carried by the right vessel.  Sune Sunesen Rendtorff – Piano & Synthesizer Carlo Janusz Becker Adrian - Trumpet & Flugelhorn Frederik Engell – Tenor saxophone Michela Turcerová – Alto saxophone Rafał Różalski – Double Bass Simon Forchhammer - Drums Cover Artwork by Sune Sunesen Rendtorff

[zef-zef]

Arooj Aftab - Bolo Na (feat. Moor Mother) from: Arooj Aftab - Night Reign (Verve, 2024)

[vexx-ation]

365 Albums in 365 Days: 1/365

Date: Monday January 1st

Album: Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Artist: Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Released: 1981

Genre: Chamber Jazz

Review: Starting off this year with some easy listening— PCO has consistent and lush instrumentals that make it ideal BG music for drawing or just chilling. Despite the ostensibly western aspects of the band, each song incorporates international rhythm patterns and musical concepts, most notably the African drumming styles peppered throughout. The band never seems to lose its indoor voice, keeping a soft, smooth sound in every song. Energy builds throughout, but the repetitive nature of the songs and building harmonies mean that the music never quite barges into the spotlight. Though complex, it’s never intrusive, inviting anyone deeper who wants to be overtaken by the sound without being very in your face. Fades and pads keep the mystery, but despite this the album never loses momentum. It’s great meditating music.

Favorite Track: Walk, Don’t Run

[thedizzyrizzler]

On this date in 1968, @vanmorrisonofficial - 'Astral Weeks' was released.

📈 #6 for 1968, #385 overall

"Astral Weeks feels like listening to literature. Like how when you're so engrossed in a novel, you do not even feel like you're reading it. The story has a hold of you and you are now in its control. Astral Weeks starts playing and you can just float - satisfied intellectually and emotionally - but still in full of surrender of Van and these amazing musicians.

If I could suggest an ideal setting for listening to it, perhaps at dawn or dusk, depending on when you're at your most vulnerable. Alone sitting on a porch, feet up, staring at an orange sky and contemplating everything and nothing in your life. It's good.

Astral Weeks is quiet and as delicate as an eyelash, but strong enough to dictate your temperament like a bag of sedatives. The light plucking double bass line throughout the album is enough to curb the crankiest insomniac amongst us. Just do not confuse Astral Weeks with dull or boring, in fact Morrison's voice alone, bends and stretches so nicely, that an a cappella version of the album would be worthy enough.

Astral Weeks is an album that needs the proper respect to be heard the right way. Background music for cleaning the house, or with the headphones on the treadmill is simply a waste of time. It rewards close inspection and can fight off any interrogation you give it." - RYM user cancon

[reckonslepoisson]

Night Reign, Arooj Aftab (2024)

On Night Reign Arooj Aftab is again masterful in her suspension of a listener in a realm of reverberant beauty. Unlike Vulture Prince, however, that mastery is contained within individual tracks; Night Reign as a whole is less immaculately well-crafted and doesn’t have the same cumulative pervasiveness. 

Pick: ‘Aey nehin’

[theparanoid]

Bark Psychosis - Hex

(1994 album)

Youtube Playlist | Bandcamp | Spotify

[Post-Rock, Ambient, Jazz-Rock, Slowcore, Chamber Jazz]

[dustedmagazine]

Reverso — Shooting Star-Étoile Filante (self-released)

On previous recordings, Reverso has explored the music of French composers Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel, linchpins of the early 20th century classical repertoire. Here, the trio of trombonist Ryan Keberle, pianist Frank Woeste, and cellist Vincent Courtois are inspired by another French composer, Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), the short-lived but prodigiously talented artist who was the first female to win the Prix de Rome. Such was the grief of her sister Nadia that she gave up her own promising composition career, devoting herself to pedagogy, a teacher to many Europeans and a raft of American expats. Reverso titles the recording Shooting Star as an acknowledgement of Lili’s extraordinary gifts. While the composer would likely have heard little jazz, her work serves as an excellent starting point for the original tunes written in response to it by Reverso. One wonders about balance issues a trio with this complement might encounter, but it never seems to be an issue, with Reverso careful to make every note heard.

“La Muse '' opens the album with liquid ostinatos from Woeste and legato melodies traded between Keberly and Courtois. “Obstination '' has a syncopated Iberian cast that recalls the craze for Spanish traditional music among the Impressionists. The solos use distinct registers, with Courtois flying high and Keberle playing resonant pedal tones. Woeste’s solo is a modal post-bop excursion that celebrates the off-kilter rhythms of the piece. Likewise, “Resilience” explores rhythmic variety, with alternations between quick polyrhythms and solos that vary it. A slow tune serves as an overarching motif. There is a bridge where small, repetitive segments take over before a return to the opening material, Keberle playing the main tune in octaves with Courtois.

The “Nocturne” is a venerable form, usually for solo piano. Reverso captures the mood with sculpted delicacy. A repeated tenor note in the piano underscores a chromatic bass-line alongside melancholy chords, as well as corruscating melodies between trombone and cello. Woeste brings out a filigreed soprano register melody in the bridge before returning to harmonies from the opening. Doubling of the melody by Keberle and Courtois gives way to another varied duet between them, culminating in a high trombone cry and a quick outro of repeated passagework. “Ma Jolie” has a bluesy trombone solo that is repeated with the cello playing liberal slides. The central section is led by Woeste, playing a zesty bit of cabaret music. Keberly returns to his solo while Courtois plays a pizzicato bass-line. The piano drops in with tasty harmonic fills. The quick cabaret music returns, and the piano and cello provide a sinuous take on the main tune to close.

“En Avant” deftly channels the texture and melodic approach of Impressionism, a style that, while not encompassing, appeared in Lili’s music. Courtois’s solo features Eastern sliding tone. Gamelan and other non-Western artists fascinated French musicians, notably Debussy, at the 1889 Paris Exhibition, and they continued to incorporate its signatures for decades. Keberle’s solo, on the other hand, is a more raucous affair, and Woeste plays dexterous small cells and a repeated stepwise progression. The close returns to referencing Impressionism and ends with halting utterances.

“Requiem” is a touching memento mori for Lili, with a haunting minor key melody that is deftly varied in its doublings. “Shine” too has a melancholy cast. However, the somber mood doesn’t prevail. “Lili’s Blues” imagines an introduction of Lili to “Le Jazz Hot,” with a plethora of glissandos and rollicking swing.

The recording closes with “Dernier Moteur” (“The Final Action”) in which bucolic riffs and mysterious, angular melodies are played by Woeste, Courtois adds a sumptuous solo, and Keberly provides countermelodies with slow glissandos that distress the crispness of the rest of the proceedings. A denouement is completed surprisingly, with the piano simply stopping to conclude the piece.

Creating “new standards” of early twentieth century music would be a far less imaginative choice than the approach taken on Shooting Star, where Lili Boulanger’s biography is as much an inspiration as her music. Reverso inhabits a musical space both of homage and innovation.

Christian Carey

[mywifeleftme]

345: Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld // Never Were the Way She Was

Never Were the Way She Was Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld 2015, Constellation (Bandcamp)

My prevailing memory of seeing Sarah Neufeld and Colin Stetson’s duo performance in a small room at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa was the way they spent much of the performance with their eyes locked on one another. When violinist Neufeld became lost in her own playing and arched backward, in the same motion Stetson would lean forward over his hulking, steampunk bass saxophone, his legs braced wide. It was as though the two of them were bound at the neck by a long, invisible leather strap. In the most intense passages, they would square off barely a foot apart, like two rams, the veins in Stetson’s sweaty neck and forehead standing out, Neufeld’s angled forearm a blur of precision cuts. Despite also seeing Stetson’s SORROW, an arrangement of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony for a 12-piece band, during the same festival, it was the intimate physicality of the duo show with Neufeld that had the bigger impact on me.

While Stetson has frequently performed in larger combos (as has Neufeld with Arcade Fire, for that matter), in solo and duo performances his uniqueness as a player is more legible. On Never Were the Way She Was, he uses his uncanny circular breathing technique to create ogrish drones (“With the Dark Hug of Time”), loop-like melodic phrases (“The Sun Roars Into View”), and even to emulate broken techno beats (“The Rest of Us”). Stetson is a pretty physically jacked guy, and when you see him do this stuff in person it’s a bit like watching a blacksmith going at his forge—on record it can be easy for an inattentive listener to miss the exertions required to produce these sounds. But when you start tuning in to the fact all of this groaning cacophony is produced by one man’s laboured lungs, its rawness and minor imprecisions become captivating.

Neufeld takes centre stage on the more somber, post-rocky tunes like the title track, her violin weeping rust as she overlooks a grey bay, Stetson contributing various fog horns and stomach upset. Now and again she wordlessly sings, but it’s always recorded distantly, like a memory of some ever-present sorrow you refuse to allow to surface. On “In the Vespers,” she sketches out a tricky rhythm that Stetson eventually echoes on a tenor sax, the pair running through an odd-time workout that would sound like prog were in not for the chilly clarity of her phrasing, the way the energy decays once again into remorse.

The pair’s previous collaboration was a 2013 film score (Blue Caprice), and the record is of a piece with the influential work Stetson has subsequently done as a soundtrack composer (notably Ari Aster’s Hereditary). As with fellow Aster collaborator the Haxan Cloak, Stetson’s work has helped to define the sound of contemporary unease. If you’ve watched a recent horror movie or psychological thriller, the palette of Never Were the Way She Was will already be familiar—but here the pieces aren’t tied to any preconceived scenario, and the interplay between the two musicians gives it a dynamism and complete-in-itself mood all its own.

345/365

[haveyouheardthisband]

[iamlisteningto]

Masayoshi Fujita’s Migratory

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

Strange Feelin' • Buzzin' Fly • Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway) • Dream Letter • Gypsy Woman • Sing A Song For You

Spotify ♪ YouTube

[burlveneer-music]

Awen Ensemble - Dùthchas - pastoral jazz from Leeds, a 5-track coda to their April 2024 album Cadair Idris

Awen Ensemble are a Leeds based contemporary jazz collective. The 7 piece outfit take inspiration from modal tradition, spiritual jazz, and folk music from around the globe, creating compositions that are melodically focused and groove driven. Featuring a vibraphone, spoken word and a Celtic mystique, Awen Ensemble bring a unique offering to the jazz table.  

[asmallexperiment]

Just felt like a folky-jazz kind of night. It's so spare that I'm amazed that the three of them can make it beautiful, as well, but it is definitely that.