There’s a punishing tenor to the new trio album by Camila Nebbia, Kit Downes and Andrew Lisle which stretches beyond the brassy and gruff yet still resonant tone of the topline saxophone.
The musicians are no strangers to the format. Nebbia’s penchant for collaboration includes several diverse trio albums over the past couple of years, for instance on Diminished Borders with her fellow saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi and the percussionist and collagist Samuel Goff, whose steeply cathartic work sometimes hews towards industrial textures, or at the other end of the spectrum on Gonggong 225088 with the guitarist Han-earl Park and Yorgos Dimitriadis on drums and electronics, who take a giddy yet heavy, at times almost pointillist approach to lyricism. Downes meanwhile played organ alongside a couple of jazz legends in Bill Frisell and Andrew Cyrille on last year’s acclaimed Red Hook Records album Breaking the Shell while Lisle is part of the Kodian Trio and has linked up with Colin Webster, Dirk Serries, Stian Larsen and John Edwards in an endless array of formations for the London label Raw Tonk.
Downes and Lisle have also played together previously as part of a trio, with Multi-Directional their album with the bassist John Edwards a recording of a 2020 set at London’s experimental venue Cafe OTO which was released on Raw Tonk in 2022.
Here on Exhaust there is less of the sputtering which might summarise Nebbia’s work with Park and Dimitriadis on Gonggong 225088. Instead her especially deep and husky tenor is joined by the thuds and clunks, the impetuous glissandos and torrential chord clusters of Downes from behind the piano while Lisle pummels away with almost the same tenacity and fervour from behind his drum kit.
That album Breaking the Shell was was a folksy and sylvan kind of outing, where Downes conjured billowing sounds from his pipe organ, layering low drones with winding and watery flute rushes as Frisell noodled away bracingly on his guitar and Cyrille played railway percussion. The trio even wound things up with a kind of nocturne as they reworked in misty-eyed fashion the Hungarian Sketches of BĆ©la BartĆ³k. Anyone familiar with the keyboardist from that album or some of his other work for the pipe organ will find Exhaust a stunning divergence as Downes plays wild and free, clamouring at his keys and making headlong runs with little respite.
Sometimes the keys and percussion are in sync, with sinister metallic plunks and more shell-like drum patter serving to introduce ‘Differential Spider’ the album opener, a clangorous track which ever so briefly finds a bluesy sense of swing. Often the tenor saxophone winds a course around the keys but sometimes Nebbia steps outside of the cauldron to encircle this rowdy din with discerning puffs of smoke, as though capturing her collaborators inside of a vortex ring.
That happens during the second half of ‘Jetsam’ before some plundering keys give way to a sense of vague disquiet, a lull at the end of the composition which seems charged only because it has grown listless, like those surfeit goods or other waste materials which have been tossed away at sea. Then after the saws and squeaks which open ‘Dissipate’ the trio build up another potent head of steam, before winding back down to something more wispy or skeletal.
Amid the ruckus and these few quieter moments, it is not until the appropriately titled ‘Enervated’ that we get a real change of pace. Nebbia’s saxophone, muffled and spectral, at first sounds like a cross between a shakuhachi blowing zen and an ondes Martenot or theremin before the piece dwindles even further to barely more than a shiver and creak.
Even when Downes and Lisle are busy clattering away there is a wariness or apparent fear of looking back which seems to shape these compositions. The piano on ‘Ten of Wands’ is still tentative even as the tenor saxophone and drums adopt huskier tones, before the trio surge again through rasping blows, a few key trills and Lisle’s swelling, clapping percussive hits.
The closer ‘Deadblow Hammer’ which might seem to aptly characterise the sound on much of this record instead offers something markedly different. Nebbia takes a slower pace and inhabits a more bronzed kind of lyricism, redolent of cool jazz and imbued with a certain mournfulness even as the keys keep on rolling and the fluttering, palpitating rhythms of the drums suggest an incipient heart attack.
