This spiky German trio revels in a staccato punchiness and is loose enough to operate often without the safety net of a fixed beat or over demanding guardrail of a groove.
Led not too gloomily from the bass clarinet by Iran born Shabnam Parvaresh, tunes from what I can gather are hers.
Pithy statements manage to swerve obliqueness and the three aren’t afraid to be direct.
The other players are guitarist Ula Martyn-Ellis who proves choppy and punk-ish on tracks like the title track ‘Transitory’ and utilitarian drummer Philipp Buck who reminds me a little of the approach of Led Bib’s Mark Holub.
I liked ‘Maroggia’ I suppose best when Martyn-Ellis takes the temperature down and there’s interesting exposition in the main bass clarinet statement that moves the sound more into the contemporary classical domain perhaps.
These three have been at it before on Gozar issued in 2023, an album that completely passed me by at the time.
Listening to it – and check out the pulsating ‘Collapse’ from Gozar in the live video – at the same time of this new context suggests the band have a sound they want to and do stick with.
If I randomly came across a track like ‘Tangled in Your Dream’ on a British Radio 3 classical programme in the context of contemporary classical music it certainly wouldn’t jar. Make of that what you will.
Certainly the approach of the trio is much closer to adventurous classical music than it is the swing era or mainstream jazz. And yet it also sits well with edgy prog tinged rock so a lot of what is here is admirably open to generous interpretation and shows how multi-faceted the approach of the trio is. Overall: not too Shabby!
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