Babel is back with this new album from Henrik Jensen leading the way
First of all it’s great to be able to review a new Babel album. It’s been four long years. Quick recap for anyone not familiar with Babel. It started in the 1990s. Run by the Vortex director Oliver Weindling Babel was fuelled by a gigantic enthusiasm for the guitar poet of suburbia ”man from Lewisham” Billy Jenkins. Significant in promoting the career of Christine Tobin early on perhaps the biggest successes the label achieved were by Polar Bear who deservedly trousered a Mercury nomination for Held on the Tips of Fingers in 2005. But generally speaking the label has received a lot of acclaim for a wide range of often excellent releases and pushes the boundaries towards a much needed greater acceptance of far more experimental ideas than the usual cosy jazz tat that bizarrely often gets raved about in a, for now, Laufey loving world.
No stranger to the label England based Danish bassist Henrik Jensen is in the catalogue but here it’s his best work so far for Babel.
A piano trio playing originals led by a bassist that doesn’t sound like either Avishai Cohen or Phronesis? Yes.
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And yes again Henrik’s fellow Dane Esben Tjalve is appealingly diffident. On ‘Brian Brexit’ – great name to describe the more deluded genus of the species who sadly prevailed in the calamity that was the 2016 referendum – finds ingenious harmonic ways to state the theme. The tune’s mood is more baffled bemusement at the thought of it all than angry indignation.
The Frome based Jensen’s bass playing is organic and tactile – we heard him live with Sara Colman a while back and he’s agile and empathetic in the company of soulful Joni Mitchell loving chanteuses such as the reliably appealing English mustard of an approach that Colman habitually delivers with fine pianist Rebecca Nash echoing that emotion.
Splashes and shimmies
There are no vocals condiments here and yet there’s lot of singable riffery and shafts of life delivered by the trio completed by Robert Plant drummer Dave Smith whose sound is full of splashes, deft shimmies and going all Ron Manager for a minute the odd nutmeg even.
Speed, acceleration, sweet left foot, all the tricks you know – the dummy, the drop of the shoulder, the shimmy, the nutmeg, jiggery-pokery, hocus pocus, abracadabra, I wanna reach out and grab ya. Steve Miller Band? Spin Doctors? Ooh, very similar.
Diamond formation
Much as we love the Steve Miller Band and the Spin Doctors, band rather than espèce de Spad, Above Your House is not that kind of record, Ron. But what it is we reckon is based on modalities coming out of Evansiana and there’s a reflectiveness on ‘The Hunt’ that we liked a good deal but it’s not a snoozy cop-out at all of a listen.
We’re Dave Holland fans and certainly anyone who is a follower of the great Wolverhampton wanderer will find a sound to believe in here from Jensen but who is very much his own man.
For fans of bass solos – and no we don’t subscribe to the theory that at the drop of the first throb stirring or otherwise it’s a signal to go to the bar mainly because we’re usually actually in one – the solo on ‘Intro’ is fascinating and very worthwhile.
Cover art is by Aurelie Freoua whose Marc Chagall-like style is a great bonus element. Final word and we defer again to the absurdly sage-like Ron for the overall verdict at the risk of mistaking fact for fiction but preferring the former. Marvellous.
