I always have to reach for my dictionary when I read the word “Syzygy”. I also find it very hard to type other than by slowing down to a halt and even then remain convinced that I have spelt it wrongly even when it is correct. I roll the word around on my tongue. Being like a 6 year old again is OK, though. I am transported to being sat in a tiny chair at an equally Lilliputian table, pencils and crayons to hand etching out the word laboriously letter by l-e-t-t-e-r.
Noel Langley – whose Edentide was easier to say, spell and pronounce, was a marvel when it was released more than a decade ago – doesn’t make many albums of his own as I suppose he is too busy doing sessions for other people, usually far more famous then he is. He’s a chameleon in some sense. Shelley, rarely far from my thoughts, springs to mind as so often:
Chameleons feed on light and air:
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Exhortation’, 1820
Poets’ food is love and fame.
Let’s go for the sense of “perfect alignment” for the sense of the word in the title when turning to meaning. As for pronunciation – another minefield – let’s go for “sizuhjee” said as you sort of see it.
Break off for a moment after doing all the head shrinking above and listen for light relief to Spike Milligan’s ‘Word Power’ sketch about a character’s expertise as a pronouncer of words whose meaning escapes him.
“I never says ’em when there’s a frost about” – Spike Milligan
Racking my brains as to what I have heard Langley on I seem to recall listening to tracks of his that he was on with Radiohead. ‘Bloom’ in particular was striking. Langley has a stellar reputation as a session player with all sorts of people. He is on King of Limbs from which ‘Bloom’ is drawn which came out about 15 years ago playing flugel and which also features his partner fellow trumpeter Yazz Ahmed who is here on, types slowly again, mouthing the word, Syzygy, in a cameo on the brass band section at the end – more about which later.
The album operates on several levels and there is a fair amount of production on portions of it but never seems over finessed. It is elegiac at its core. That is important. There is a big influence of Kenny Wheeler on it, most obviously on the beautiful track ‘Beyond Our Ken’ but elsewhere too. I suppose it’s the plangent modalities NL turns to for this and the power he finds unexpectedly. This isn’t a brash kind of trumpet record at all.
The interplay with pianist Alcyona Mick, who was also on Edentide referred to earlier, is brilliant.
Mick, whose work with Brigitte Beraha I admire, I managed to hear a few times a few decades ago playing in duo with Paul Clarvis downstairs in the Vortex, is here at her best. My pick of the tracks overall involves her heavily and is is called ‘Contemplation.’
You get a sadness on the album. But it is a sadness that is transformative, which is different from the dour misery of which there is none. Langley, who I think is around 63, studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and entered the studios, did TV sessions and West End shows. He has an incredibly strong technique. If, kind reader, you are a trumpeter yourself, then you have to get this.
Recorded largely at SJE Arts in Oxford in February 2020 there are three originals and 4 improvisations. According to the BBC, SJE Arts was known for its Piano Series, and operated out of St John the Evangelist Church. The church is the main chapel for theological college St Stephen’s House but SJE has stopped putting on concerts there since.
The acoustics are pretty special, it’s clear even listening on Bandcamp on cheap headphones plugged into a battered laptop.
I think the album is available on vinyl too which I’d recommend getting if you can. I usually think digital is OK. But I make an exception here. Alcyona also plays church organ in addition to piano but it’s really the piano passages that are more interesting. I’d compare her sound to the essence of Liam Noble‘s a bit.
There is an ambient studio portion to the album that came out of Langley’s work for a documentary which is counterintuitively a little less successful than the more unplanned segments which elsewhere prevail. But more positively I find the Sally Army-like brass band arrangement of ‘Houses to the Sun’ with raw spoken word by one Thomas Popiolek quite moving at the end even though the mix is all over the place. I added Syzygy high up among the top UK jazz releases I reckon this year – you can find the full list here.
