I can’t get too excited about Swedish jazz quintet People In Orbit. All involved are clearly highly proficient players and what’s here is engagingly enough played. But I’m looking for more of a spark beyond the largely appealing but yet overly doleful 21st century version of a hard bop style.
Led by trumpeter and composer Adam Sass, who wrote the tunes – he comes over as a bit like early period Christian Scott (Chief Adjuah nowadays) – as Sass did for the far more engrossing Close/Away issued by Naxos label Prophone in 2023.
The unit who hail from Malmö have stuck together and have Edvin Ekman on tenor saxophone, Niklas Bergström – piano and synthesiser – Edvin Elmersson who provides a totemic Öresund Bridge-like beacon of the beat on bass, and Frank William Reis, drums. The album contains a central suite at times very brooding in nature called ‘Cycles’ that dominates too much.
The album could do with a bit more relief given how tension prevails too much. But you get a decent dollop of this on the more appealing ‘Spinning Downwards’ that’s my preferred pick of the tracks.
