Rugged tunes and rigorous ideas fleshed out
Some years ago I was sat upstairs in a north London pub called the Oxford in Kentish Town.
On that night in 2021 was a band led by trumpeter Alexandra Ridout.
It was a pretty good gig, Ridout is a brilliant stylist.
The place was fairly full. It didn’t need to be miked up at all and you could get close to the band. The sightlines were good.
Later on another unbilled trumpeter came on to do a guest spot.
Call on Curreri
His name was Joey Curreri. And if memory serves me correctly he played Horace Silver standard the Blowin’ the Blues Away (1959 – Blue Note) classic ‘Peace.’ He didn’t quite upstage the remarkable Ridout. But nearly.
Certainly American player Curreri does his best again to be the talking point on this must hear new album by pianist Toomas Keski-Säntti.
But competition is not the name of the game when an album works as this clearly does.
Collaboration is what it’s all about.
That plus the impulse factor, the heat of creation – the bravery of creating new work in the moment given that this album was done in a single day.
Appetite for Esser
Tunes are the Finn’s and everything is built on their strong qualities.
The Helsinki player (born 1995) studied at the Sibelius Academy and was later a member of OK:KO.
OK: KO via WeJazz issued Liesu in 2022.
Also notable on this album is the bassist Simón Willson, known for his work with Ethan Iverson, while the quartet is completed by drummer Jonas Esser.
Esser, second from the left in the photo above, is on the excellent recent release by Lukas DeRungs called Wake.
Unearth – hardly ideal “fingers” cover art by the way: just as well its peculiarity is no reflection on the quality of the very unquirky music – was recorded in a Brooklyn studio in October 2023.
The pianist, whose style reminds me of that of Alexi Tuomarila a bit, clearly likes to write in a progressively tilted hard bop manner.
But he’s not afraid to be romantic either and does that side of things very well on ‘We’ll Never Meet,’ the longest track here. A convincing ballad. It is the best thing of this largely enjoyable album that promises much as a profile raiser internationally.
The tunes have a rugged quality driven by strong themes and logical development.
Nevertheless It’s a bit brief – the whole thing could do with a few more tunes. But ‘Dualism’ is also strong. That’s when Curreri is at his most dynamic.
And there is a tension in the main melody when he rises to the challenge of the darker mood written into the tune that he proves so adept at cultivating a response for.
Composed while the pianist was living in New York, Keski-Säntti met Curreri when he was doing a masters degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 2022. Also remarkably – no tinkering about in a studio for months on end like certain hapless pop acts waiting forever for the muse to descend – Unearth was productively recorded in a single session that day in Brooklyn.
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