Moody and noir-ish this Mark Rothko inspired album starts to get more interesting a few tracks in on ‘Untitled Stories’ where there’s more of a groove provided by the drummer. You don’t need to know it’s inspired by a painter by the way although some titles give a clue eg, ‘Seagram Murals.’
Mostly tunes by the Cool School sounding introverted tenor saxophonist-flautist leader Matthias Van den Brande who is from Belgium, it’s really trumpeter fellow countryman Jean-Paul Estiévenart who dominates most appealingly within the album’s designery orbit, particularly on the first four tracks and best of all on final track ‘Subway’ when he really breaks loose.
‘Multiforms’ is when tenor and trumpet work more in lockstep in the harmonies of the head. The bassist Tijs Klassen’s track ‘Chapel II’ is an outlier but is skippable.
Drummer Wouter Kühne completes the personnel. Sonics are excellent – the album was recorded at top French studio La Buissonne over 3 days of February last year. That – and the skill of the audio engineer – is why.
Van den Brande is far more interested in the insouciance of the gallerist, the less is more intellectual spirit ushered into jazz eventually by In a Silent Way and taken on so appealingly way down the road by Mark Isham modally on a more recent masterpiece like Blue Sun. And it swings a bit too – trigger alert avant jazzerati, there’s nary a freakout hereabouts – pretty convincingly on the deftly mobile ‘Multiforms.’
Watch the video that accompanies ‘Seagram Murals.’
