Radically different in complexion to the equally essential Anglo-Hungarian collaboration No Blues on the Danube recently issued and even more in contrast to 2020’s What’s New saxophonist Iain Ballamy’s fine collaboration with Ian Shaw and Jamie Safir, Riversphere is more jazztronica, and can be compared more easily to Ballamy’s work with his Anglo-Scandinavian project Food.
Tunes, including originals, are atmospheric. There’s a certain group think at play. It’s noir, 21st century forward facing rather than stuck in a mythic jazz reverie from the 1940s and certainly isn’t a period piece. Floating, meditative: the direction smashes through the confines of a riff/groove vice-like grip and also avoids an over reliance on the comfort blanket of obvious vamps or the slippery slope towards bland soundscapery that could have been an outcome.
I liked the version of Bill Frisell’s ‘Strange Meeting’ for its poise and sang froid. Ballamy’s tonal and timbral command is as characterful as it is in different contexts whether with June Tabor in Quercus or back in the day with Bill Bruford’s Earthworks or in Loose Tubes.
It is like a hymnal wisdom on a piece like ‘As Time Passes’ – trumpets responding to the saxophone’s incantatory call – and you encounter that spiritual seam he taps into sometimes all the way through his career, particularly evident on his classic very hard to find 1990s album All Men, Amen.
Guitarist Rob Luft plays a big role on an intensely compelling work that’s a hugely rewarding listen and provides no little tendresse throughout – the sound is completed by bassist Conor Chaplin, drummer Corrie Dick, trumpeter Laura Jurd and Iain’s son Charlie also on trumpet. Luft’s role is a little like John Parricelli’s when he played with Andy Sheppard circa Movements in Colour but this is far floatier, stripped of any IndoJazz trappings and more – dare I say? – ambient. The plangent Nils Petter Molvær-like atmosphere of ‘One For All’ is irresistible. Ballamy is at his most Getzian on 60s Buarque & Jobim smoocher ‘Retrato em branco e preto’ aka ‘Zingaro’. And there’s fine bass work from Chaplin on the same tune that forms a kind of counterpoint of parallel conversational rapport to complement Luft’s skatingly melismatic like mobility.
