At a glance
Looking ahead the prospect of Lophae’s Perfect Strangers is an early-2025 reason to be, however absurdly, cheerful.
We have named it album of the week but Perfect Strangers isn’t out for a few months.
Go figure that conundrum if you have enough time on your hands and the propensity to chin stroke. As a distraction exercise from attempting to wrangle your neck wattle into a manageable weave also why not.
However, and being perfectly serious for a moment, there is enough to go on dear reader for you to latch on to in terms of pre-release sounds issued as singles.
This sax, guitar, bass guitar, drums plus guest trumpet entity has a great thing going and a sound that manages to harness being progressive and interesting without forgetting to connect with the listener or resort to baffling navel gazing.
Releasing the umbilical cord to reveal ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Dedication To David T’ are the tracks streaming. The video tells a lot too about their chordal poise and purpose.
How you say their name
Lophae – you say it like “Lo-Fi”.
The second syllable rhymes at the end with ”high” (rather than ”tea”).
Tunes are by guitarist Greg Sanders that the band to a tee improvise over.
Sanders isn’t as well known as the bassist here Tom Herbert.
In fact no one here really is but you could say that more broadly about most jazz musicians.
While a quartet guesting on ‘Family Tree’ is Cuban trumpeter Yelfris Valdés 5 tracks in who proves quite Jay Phelps-like stylistically. He adds some decorative flourishes.
Quite ECM-ish in nature at first and then shifting a bit into more of a samba-fied blend but subtle with it there is a floaty pastoral feel to the tracks streaming so far both of which come at the beginning of the album. They were recorded at Willesden studio Fish Factory last year. Notably the recording benefits from mastering by Caspar Sutton-Jones known for his work over at the Tileyard for Gearbox down near Pentonville.
Drummer Ben Brown is fairly undemonstrative at first and reveals himself more as the album progresses and stickier grooves develop.
Sam Rapley on tenor saxophone inhabits a space that in recent years Mark Turner has made his own. His own approach is aptly laconic and dreamy.
Ripples of riffery
Sanders’ riffing and theme development on ‘Vicentina’ while still gentle and evocative shakes the album up a bit with its samba-esque feel nicely coloured by Brown.
All tracks clock in at under 8 minutes each. The briefest, ‘Greatfields’, lands a touch under half that and because of that relative brevity has the best chance of radio play on the likes of Jazz FM given how radio stations are more obsessed about length than anyone else as there are ads to find room for and interminable presenter prattle to put up with.
A procession of soloists do not loiter with intent
The band play as a band. It’s not obviously or much at all a head, solo, head sort of idea although as the album proceeds you can make out the shapes of even the thornier constructed tunes a bit more.
Best of all the feel is loose and open. And while the language leaps off from the modern jazz of the 1960s and probably even more the 70s you can’t call what’s here a bebop or hard bop affair at all even when the language hints at it. It doesn’t feel massively retro.
Greg Sanders background
Sanders elsewhere has a ”world/spiritual-jazz ensemble” called Teotima that Rapley has also been involved with. And the guitarist with Herbert and George Bird appeared in a trio that two years ago released Eight Songs.
He has also played guitar with and MD’d for Congolese-Argentinian singer Juanita Euka whose debut Mabanzo came out in 2022. Herbert (acclaimed for his work in The Invisible and Polar Bear) is also on that recording.
Catchy cats
The Perfect Strangers title track again contains a samba feel. And Brown makes this feeling his own. Rapley lobs in a few Paul Desmond-like ideas as he improvises over the top of it, a process that works. Herbert here and throughout is a stately Dave Holland-like presence and very persuasive that robust but understated beat is.
‘Greatfields’ is the catchiest of the tracks. There’s an Afrojazz sensibility to some passages on the album too a factor that surely will appeal to anyone into Lionel Loueke as we certainly are. (If you need something to play after checking out Lophae play Holland and Loueke’s new work we suggest from their upcoming riot of riff-groove alchemy, United).
Finally, I do hope these sounds make it to the jazz club and touring circuit as a live incarnation and that Perfect Strangers isn’t only a studio project.
It deserves and needs, given how all great jazz needs to be heard in the flesh playing to the biggest possible audience, the widest dissemination.
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