At a glance
2022 saw Last Decade which I think is a slightly better record mainly because it has Manu Katché on it who isn’t here and who added a more incisive gritty definition to the drum sound.
That said pianist Benjamin Lackner’s latest has quite a few compelling tunes on it. And it is an album about doing non-obvious things with melody that, a step on, harnesses incremental flow from seemingly simple ingredients to create a range of unique moments.
A grace and deepness to the acoustic approach
There is a certain grace and deepness to his approach again. A freedom in the groove gradually expresses itself more in its very spaciousness.
The recording was made last year in a French studio. Lackner is German-American.
The soft as dawn tonal panoramic trumpet playing of Norwegian Mathias Eick’s is fairly unmistakable.
Eick was on the earlier album.
The ethereal Norwegian’s best soloing on the new one is on ‘Anacapa’. (Anacapa Island is a place off the coast of California.)
Mark Turner is incapable of making a bad record. However, the main front line action pivots perhaps too much in Eick’s favour. (We break off to lose ourselves once again in Temporary Kings, Turner’s masterpiece that landed within the Iversonian firmament issued in 2018.)
Linda May Han Oh is a stately presence most of all in that regard on ‘Ahwahnee.’
Tunes are very melodic and the album is extremely accessible in a taut rather than indulgently laidback softly melancholic way. Lackner doesn’t showboat at all in his soloing and is very less is more.
Dreamjazz to warm the cockles of the hearts of even the most hardened and pessimistic of philosophers
You could call it dreamjazz if you like to use a term coined by the critic Paul Morley when the much missed Observer Music Monthly was around which is as good a description as any. We are extrapolating but here making a quantum leap from Madlib, Polar Bear, the streets of Soho and beyond in the Morley universe it is essentially acoustic chamber jazz that does not ramp up to the tempo of anything approaching a frenetic pace. And it is also about the mysterious often conflicting interiors of emotion radical somehow in its verisimilitude.
‘See You Again My Friend’ is the pick of the first 5 tunes by a long way – probably the whole album. We preferred the earlier parts of the album to the looser latter tracks although in some ways these latter portions are where the greatest risks are taken, most of them carefully gauged and they largely come off well.
A Ronnie’s show chimes with the Spindrift release
Spindrift is out next week. It’s very much a mood piece that sounds sophisticated and despite its accessibility isn’t about lowest common denominators or like an easy listen even if the foot is off the accelerator. Lackner also plays Ronnie Scott’s on 14 January three days before the album’s official release with a band including Eick and French jazzer Chazarenc from the album plus the great Ambrose Akinmusire bassist Harish Raghavan from the States and Polish saxist Maciej Obara completing the sound.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
You must be logged in to post a comment.