Finding this quite hard to engage with given its sugar coated opening, by the end I quickly realised that I much preferred the approach on last year’s Solos: Miniatures and Tales instead.
‘Nature Boy’ one of the standards that I’ve heard far too much of in recent years is here, and while the production makes it sound contemporary the melody is too ubiquitous for anyone usefully to do anything new with it right now given how lots of other people have got in there first. Please! A moratorium on new versions for at least a decade. Notwithstanding such familiarity, Immanuel Wilkins’ florid contributions in the blend lifts it quite a bit.
Inspired by Rumi’s poem The Guesthouse it’s access all areas for all manner of inputs but what’s lacking is a central core beyond the lyrics pianist Shai Maestro writes and the additional instrumentation.
Shaped around a quartet of keyboardist Gadi Lehavi, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Ofri Nehemya joining the pianist leader there’s folk and jazz-rock elements to the style but everything overlaps rather than inhabits its own neat world.
Michael Mayo’s contributions to ‘Strange Magic’ work ok and even better is singer Maro on ‘Gloria.’
There’s a big cast of players and a lot of post production has gone into the blend. The results are soft and velvety, quite poppy in places. I don’t know how it fits into the array of jazz styles out there right now. It’s very much an outlier of a record. If, like me, you want the more purist jazz side of Maestro’s work it’s definitely an idea to look elsewhere and back to Maestro’s already considerable body of work with 2018 marvel The Dream Thief first in the must hear list.
MORE REVIEWS
Alcyona Mick and Liam Noble, Distant Plains: The Planets Revisited, Caliban Sounds/One Little Independent ***1/2
Two become one in the moment
