Nala Sinephro – Endlessness

The new album by Nala Sinephro opens as a trio over a sustained tone and emergent blips and beeps, with the muted saxophone of James Mollison and Morgan Simpson’s gently careening percussion giving a mercurial sense of drive to Sinephro’s elegant keys and oscillating synths. Continuing more or less where she left off upon the release of her acclaimed debut Space 1.8, this opening track sets a template for the rest of the album, which abounds in these almost eighties-themed pastoral washes and arpeggiated synths, whose rise and fall is overlaid by synthetic chicanery in the form of celestial bleeps and helical ascents plus the warm acoustic palette laid out by some of London’s premier jazz wanderers.

For such a pleasant and temperate trip, carried by the single arpeggio which drifts throughout parts one-thru-ten of a vast and humble ‘continuum’, the record Endlessness boasts a remarkably diverse cast from one track to the next, as Sinephro is joined not only by the Ezra Collective saxophonist Mollison and Simpson of the recently suspended fusion rockers black midi but Sheila Maurice-Grey who leads the jazz and Afrobeat collective Kokoroko, the standout tenor of the connective thread Nubya Garcia, the composer and jazz pianist Lyle Barton, the drummer Natcyet Wakili of the newly formed Tryp Tych Tryo and the synth bassist Dwayne Kilvington who produces soulful hip hop under the name Wonky Logic.

Wakili and Kilvington accompanied Sinephro for her debut release, a live loosie recorded at Real World Studios, and on Space 1.8 they both played their part alongside Garcia, Mollison, Barton and a handful of fellow musicians, even as Sinephro also proffered a couple of solo tracks and culled 75-second shorts from three-hour extended jam sessions. Yet on Endlessness the partnerships with Barton and Wakili are more pronounced, with Sinephro’s fathomless pools traced by Barton’s limpid keys while Wakili girds and shapes the compositions through his subtly plosive and cascading percussion.

So on ‘Continuum 2’ we segue as though effortlessly from a trio to a quintet as Wakili’s cymbals open up a reverberant space for twinkling piano runs and the burnished strains of Maurice-Grey’s flugelhorn. The rich tones of Nubya Garcia’s tenor sax commence a deepening through the second half of the track, opulent and multifaceted before the first flush of Sinephro’s harp dissipates any gloom through its blithe and spritely arpeggios. ‘Continuum 3’ finally foregrounds that harp – which Sinephro learned clandestinely as she sought respite from more formal instruction in such diverse instruments as the fiddle and bagpipes – although with a zither-like counterpoint and a top line of synthesizer which approaches cooing vocal registers.

A beacon of tranquility and time when it emerged in the still tenebrous fall of 2021, it was the fate of Space 1.8 to capture a moment in the upstart trajectory of ambient jazz, as the record was often paired with Promises where a seven-note motif by the electronic musician Floating Points and the climactic strings of the London Symphony Orchestra were bedded around what turned out to be a spectral farewell from the throat and mouth of the tenor great Pharoah Sanders. If the approach on Endlessness is still rooted in jazz, the sound here leans more towards classical music of a folkish or impressionist bent, whose stately pastoralism is sometimes offset by spiritual embellishments in the vein of Sun Ra or Alice Coltrane’s own distinct fourth world meditations.

The brief solo of ‘Continuum 4’ is the closest Endlessness comes to a piano ballad, as some of those celestial squiggles and the unmoored swaying of the synths serve to overlay Sinephro’s barely audible vocal utterances, whose cadences might call to mind songs by Grouper and Jonnine. Then Garcia’s saxophone pours through the short ‘Continuum 5’ and when Wakili’s drums join the fray on ‘Continuum 6’ we are off to the races again, with another penny tossed into the slot machine, kind of like the arcade game OutRun being played on an astral plane while grapes and amber-filled flutes are proffered by a cherubic retinue. It always seems liveliest on the surface of these compositions but the effect is boundlessly deep, while across the ten tracks of Endlessness there is a finely wrought balance between pared-back approaches and these bouncier numbers.

The sawing synthesizer squibs with their bassy undertones at the start of ‘Continuum 7’ seem to commence a descent, although barely clipping a rung in this ethereal game of snakes and ladders, a counterpart to the third track as Sinephro is joined by Barton for a corkscrew of elegant keys and quavering synthesizers. The eighth track belies its means, slipping into a subdued techno groove despite its plethora of instruments, with a woozy middle section furnished by Wonky Logic’s synthetic bass and Wakili’s scattering drums, then punctuated by a rattling hand clap before the rustling chimes of the concluding moments.

Back to the trio format for the last two tracks, ‘Continuum 9’ features queasy organ tones and a stop-start motif on the tenor sax with lovely fraying ends, whose sustained puffs and blows culminate in one long squall before fading out. And on the closer Sinephro takes the lead over padded percussion and synthetic bass, as the iterative grasps of a yearning and ravishing ascent are buttressed by Wakili’s unusually insistent patter behind the drum kit, whereby deft blows and cymbal crashes blend and merge to almost form one breakless beat. In this manner Endlessness approaches its climax, reaching ever higher in a pattern of squiggles and spirals towards some blissful and divine, lofty and potentially foreclosed destination, before returning to native shores through the final solace of lapping keys.