Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra – Promises
The generation-spanning album by the electronic producer Sam Shepherd, the legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra carries a simple conceit, shifting endlessly around the spare framework of a seven-note melody played variously on piano, harpsichord, and synths. The ascending pattern provides the loosest of scaffolding for the soaring tenor of Sanders, whose sheets of sound once involved searing caterwauls and fiery cascades of arpeggios and chords played in swift succession, now supplanted by the glacial sweep of his horn on a record which devotes itself to an exploration of texture.
Sam Shepherd, whose previous albums as Floating Points dabbled in jazz and carried a breadth of live instrumentation while paying homage to his influences and exuding a wiry electronic warmth, first met with Sanders after the sax icon discovered his 2015 debut Elaenia. After agreeing to collaborate, it was Shepherd who enlisted the London Symphony Orchestra to perform arrangements for the double bass, cellos, violas, and violins. The result has drawn comparisons with Black Unity, the 37-minute experimental opus which Sanders recorded and released in 1971, though conceptually Promises is divided into nine phrases or movements.
On the first album bearing his name for more than a decade, the 80-year-old jazz veteran foregoes the spiritual chants and polyrhythmic percussion which served to define some of his best work, instead eulogising over sinuous synths and mounting strings. Aching and languorous over the first few movements, the verbal blabber and descending flurries of ‘Movement 4’ and ‘Movement 5’ culminate in the swooning melodies and sensory maelstrom of ‘Movement 6’, when cellos flume and the London Symphony Orchestra reaches its climax. ‘Movement 7’ then plays out like an alien zither, before Sanders relinquishes his tenor and Promises chugs to a close through wafts of smoke.
On his debut for Blue Note Records, the guitarist Julian Lage summoned the breadth of Americana from sonorous coastal melodies to monumental valleys with their open vistas and sandstone peaks. Playing alongside his longtime bassist Jorge Roeder and the more recent addition of Dave King on drums, nine originals fill the seams between free improvisation and traditional singer-songwriting, boasting a rockabilly twang and a boundless swing.
The Johnny Mandel and Johnny Mercer ballad ‘Emily’, long associated with Bill Evans, serves as the delicate centrepiece of Squint and there are hints of the Beach Boys and Vince Guaraldi among more over references to jazz and the blues. ‘Familiar Flower’ is dedicated to the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd, the title track references an unaccompanied Billy Higgins drum solo and the bouncing splay of ‘Line Up’ by the pianist Lennie Tristano, and ‘Day and Age’ is reprised from Lage’s own 2015 album World’s Fair, before ‘Call of the Canyon’ closes on a note of starry wonder.
Laila Sakini – Strada & Princess Diana of Wales
‘While other artists blended their samples and field recordings with domestic sounds and other diaphanous home comforts, or drew inspiration from the act of sporadic or extended retreat, from the foothills of Melbourne by way of an unexpectedly desolate London, the producer Laila Sakini embarked on an endless highway. Two records released in the space of a month featured rustling and restlessly muted, low fidelity takes on jazz, dub, and trip hop.
Like two sides of a coin rubbed the same way between thumb and forefinger, on Strada the artist made fine use of a borrowed guitar, smeared samples, a whinnying saxophone, and barebones bass clarinet, even if the epic wandering was confined to the blank alleyways and shadowy streets of an enforced staycation. On ‘The Blue Room’ and ‘Stephens Secret’ we juke and dive between burnouts with a cyberpunk flair or listen as the cars rev their engines haplessly in the driveway, before ‘Towards The Opaline Sky’ cranks the scene back to life, a motorised whirligig which takes flight and soars through the skyspace.
As Princess Diana of Wales, Sakini donned a foulard marinière and the smudged garb of royalty for the Melbourne record label A Colourful Storm, foregrounding her vocals over plucked bass, slow-strummed guitar, and the roiling clip-clop of percussion. From the downbeat ‘Still Beach’ where the singer watches her future wash away for the sake of the moment, to the spare basslines and aching exhortations of ‘Swing’ and ‘Closer’, through the spectral sea shanty where ‘Fragments of Blue’ become ‘fragments of you’ in a queasy and flickering rumination, songs seem to arch towards choruses which never quite transpire, lost in the moment of exhalation.’
Moritz Von Oswald Trio – Dissent
For his first album under the moniker since Sounding Lines with Tony Allen and Max Loderbauer back in 2015, the dub techno mastermind Moritz von Oswald arrived with a new trio featuring Heinrich Köbberling on drums and Laurel Halo on keys. Edited down from a series of extended jam sessions, the ten chapters plus preface and epilogue to Dissent are all headspace even as von Oswald eschews metallic timbres for a slinkier and more organic sound palette, which incorporates rainforest samples and swathes of jazz fusion amid the percussive crashes and roiling dub atmospheres.
From the opening drone of the preface, the collection unfolds steadily with surprising transformations as grooves burrow down and take root before sprouting up someplace else. ‘Chapter 1’ summons spectres of Bitches Brew but all undercurrent, while ‘Chapter 2’ builds around an off-kilter cowbell, thickly ascending chords, and tremulous synths. The later pieces are more meditative as castanets and shakers tease open a space filled by muted jazz and the lithe drumming of Köbberling, while on organ and piano Halo serves the tonic, whose shimmering flourishes suspend the dark angularity of the music, providing a sense of buoyancy as Dissent traces its way downstream.
Nala Sinephro – Space 1.8Nala Sinephro took a clandestine and circuitous approach to the pedal harp, learning to play the instrument under the cover of evening as she sought respite from the fiddle and violin in an otherwise empty high school music room. Her debut album for Warp Records finds the Caribbean Belgian composer in full bloom, accompanied by a stellar cast of British jazz musicians including the saxophonists James Mollison, Ahnansé, and Nubya Garcia whose Source proved one of the records of 2020, the pianist Lyle Barton, the Sons of Kemet drummer Eddie Hick, and the synth bassist Dwayne Kilvington who produces soulful hip hop under the name Wonky Logic.
From the birdsong and other early morning chatter to the nocturnal crickets which open the album, Space 1.8 blurs the contours between time and season, bubbling and burgeoning with a celestial shiver. The swift helical ascent of ‘Space 3’ was culled from a three-hour session with Hick and Kilvington, while ‘Space 4’ showcases the rich tenor of Garcia, its submerged synths the holdover from a lost moment of composition. ‘Space 5’ finds lush verdancy between liminal blips and beeps, and ‘Space 6’ buzzes with a bristling anxiety. On ‘Space 7’ the plucked strings and glissandi of the pedal harp return to the fore, leaving ‘Space 8’ as the extended afterglow, full of intimacy and yearning.
‘Dedicated to the memory of his grandfather who passed away before he was born, with Hidemi the prolific composer and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi delved deeper into the shared and personal experiences of life inside the Japanese American concentration camps of the Second World War.
Stacking up layers of alto, baritone, tenor, C melody, and soprano saxophone, the record opens with the siren calls and foghorn wails of ‘Beachside Lonelyhearts’ before the despairing squalls and labyrinthine trails of ‘Tule Lake Like Yesterday’ bray against the camps and their abiding horrors. Tule Lake was one of ten concentration camps which corralled nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during the war, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens.
‘Jellyfish in the Sky’ and ‘What Happens When People Open Their Hearts’ take a more winding and circuitous approach, before Shiroishi touches upon some of the wider complexities of race with ‘Stand Up and Let Us Go and Witness This Ourselves’, which incorporates aspects of ragtime and swing, and ‘To Kill a Wind-Up Bird’, which references Harper Lee and Haruki Murakami, finding a throughline before its parts crash together in fiery denouement.
Snare brushes provide a sense of breathy hesitation to the solitary and pensive ‘Without the Threat of Punishment There Is No Joy in Taking Flight’, and the celestial squiggle and burnished glow of ‘The Long Bright Dark’ finally breaks on soaring choruses. Drawing inspiration from the Japanese concept of ‘gaman’, which means to endure the unbearable with patience and dignity, Patrick Shiroishi continues to stand up for the past while pushing at the borders of free jazz and solo improvisation.’
William Parker – Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World, Painters Winter, and Mayan Space Station
Even by the prodigious standards of William Parker, 2021 proved to be a banner year. The prolific double bassist presided over three projects and twelve discs as bandleader, collaborated as a duo on the politically-minded No Joke! with his wife Patricia Nicholson while celebrating a joyous Re-Union with the pianist Matthew Shipp, and contributed to almost a dozen additional records, including the acclaimed jazz album of the year candidate Jesup Wagon by the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as part of his Red Lily Quintet.
All in all the bassist produced more than twenty discs of new music. In 1995 the Village Voice was already calling Parker ‘the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time’ following his years of service with Cecil Taylor, and by 2008 – around the time of the orchestral Double Sunrise Over Neptune, the shifting colours of Petit Oiseau, and Beyond Quantum where he played alongside the percussionist Milford Graves and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton – Downbeat magazine was heralding Parker as ‘one of the most adventurous and prolific bandleaders in jazz’. In 2021 as he approached his seventieth birthday, Parker still managed to scale new peaks.
On Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World, the artist composed sun-kissed songs of praise, strained rhapsodies, and exhortations in the name of perseverance over the course of ten hours and ten sprawling suites. Drawing from a diverse array of instruments including the fujara, donsongoni, balafon, guembri, and cornet alongside his familiar double bass, Parker sometimes dropped out of the mix entirely, with the second suite written for Eri Yamamoto on solo piano and the seventh suite written for the solo voice of Lisa Sokolov.
Conceived for an international and inter-generational blend of singers and musicians, Migration of Silence swings between lively pastorals and more explicit politics, from the opening suite of buoyant scene setting and brushstroke percussion with Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez on vocals, to the final tracks of the project where reedy train sounds give way to a boundless string quartet.
An interview with James Baldwin from the 1963 broadcast The Negro and the American Promise opens the third disc, as over brusquely plucked bass, industrial clangs, and brass hollerings the author and poet diagnoses a society of ‘moral monsters’ and reiterates the phrase ‘how are you going to save yourselves?’ ‘Sun Song’ reprises the bucolic sound of the earlier suites, only the babbling vocal of Ellen Christi never finds a resting place. ‘The Map Is Precise’ unfolds as a rapturous call for change, as Kyoko Kitamura ends the track with an ode to improvisation, and Fay Victor stalks out the melody on a suite devoted to Harlem, before Parker pays tribute to his favourite Italian filmmakers.
Following Migrations of Silence at the start of the year, by the summer Parker was back with two more albums on AUM Fidelity. Elaborating on the rich evocations of art and poetry which characterised the earlier project, Painters Winter saw Parker pick up the trombonium and shakuhachi as he reconvened with Daniel Carter and Hamid Drake for a follow-up to the 2000 album Painter’s Spring. Mayan Space Station meanwhile served as Parker’s first electric guitar album, as the composer and bassist set the stage for the sonic vibrations of Ava Mendoza with Gerald Cleaver filling the pocket on drums. Together the trio conjured a quasi-mythic cosmic fusion in the venerable spirit of Sun Ra.
