There’s a bit of the Lizard King about ‘Work Song For A Scattered Past’, the opening salvo from the latest Fire! album Testament, with its souped-up swagger and whiskey-soaked, careening strut redolent of everything from the ‘Alabama Song’ and ‘Back Door Man’ to ‘Wild Child’, the ‘Roadhouse Blues’ and ‘Been Down So Long’ which serves as a loaded riposte to ‘Love Her Madly’. On all of those Doors albums that sound came courtesy of Ray Manzarek’s keyboard bass and a slew of session musicians, including Larry Knechtel and Doug Lubahn, the jazz bassist Leroy Vinnegar, the blues rock pioneer Lonnie Mack and Elvis Presley’s last bassist Jerry Scheff of the TCB Band, but on Testament the burden falls squarely on the shoulders of Johan Berthling, who adds a saunter and a slide to that old walking bass, proud and brash, leering and a little bit glassy-eyed as it cuts a swathe right from the outset of the composition. For their eighth album as a trio – without including their ensemble work as part of the Fire! Orchestra, whose recent wayfarer Echoes proved one of Culturedarm’s favourite records of 2023 – Fire! spurn all the accoutrements of flutes and electronics, extras and special guests, recording live in the studio to analogue tape with Berthling’s bass suspended by Mats Gustafsson’s squalling and chafing sax, cut through by Andreas Werlin who keeps up an incessant march behind the drum set.
The achingly stretched and crosswise-slanted strings of frequent Fire! collaborators Josefin Runsteen and Leo Svensson Sander give way to an ebullient wash of synths on the new piece by Goran Kajfeš Tropiques, a burgeoning or free-falling trip of hypnotic jazz which has been making waves around the We Jazz office and Digelius record store in Helsinki. The opener ‘Unity In Diversity’ from the quartet’s upcoming album Tell Us soon slips into a sumptuous groove, with Kajfeš’ celestially straining trumpet and Johan Berthling’s plucked bass delineating the two poles as Alexander Zethson strikes a slightly woozy note with pitch bending and rubato on the keys, drum rolls serving to cap Johan Holmegard’s enfolding percussion.
Sometimes exploring the rockier outcrops always with a focus on rhythm and texture, the alto saxophonist Caroline Davis and guitarist and banjoist Wendy Eisenberg share a penchant for intellectual rigour and a sort of serpentine or avian intimacy, circuitous and reflective and sometimes viewed as if from above. That inclination comes to the fore on Accept When, an album of gentle improvisation between friends which accents their vocals, as on the opening track ‘Attention’ which serves as a test of nerve and a tacit conversation, teasing out the perimeter of both me and you. In the name of catharsis, Devon Welsh brings the ruckus. Through arid synth landscapes, roiling and recoiling guitar lines and lilting soft-spoken word, the duo of Aran Epochal and Anar Badalov mark a quick turnaround as ARANANAR, with the Czech vocalist saying something covertly amid the solitudinous warmth and plosive percussion, a spectral liturgy underneath a litany of stars.
Doubly prolific since their appearance as sages, co-creators and accompanists alongside André 3000 on his surprise flute album New Blue Sun, the shamanistic producer and percussionist Carlos Niño and the guitarist Nate Mercereau are joined by the multi-instrumentalist Idris Ackamoor, whose Pyramids recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, for their first outpouring as a trio on Free, Dancing . . . . Under the dubious monicker Hans Anselm – perhaps best conceived as a halfway house somewhere between the Canterbury monk who argued a priori for the existence of God and the grievous merchant who initiated an incendiary feud with the whole of Saxony – the quintet of Gabriel Rosenbach on the trumpet and flugelhorn, Benedikt Schnitzler on guitar, Anna Wohlfarth on the piano, Arne Imig on bass and Leon Griese on drums capture themes of melancholy and hope with a mellifluous cadence.
Flamenco waits to break out on the eighth miniature by the bassist Joëlle Leandre and accordionist Pascal Contet but the beat never drops and the castanets never clatter, the strained sighs and bows and scrapes which draw out the sheer materiality of their instruments ceding on ‘Miniatures 9’ to winsome pastoralism as the longtime duo make a rare foray on tape. FUJ||||||||||TA returns to Hallow Ground with breathy whispers that devolve or ascend into guttural throes over the shifting rhythms of his pipe organ. That leaves the devoted Ethiopian nun and pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou to bring this week’s roundup to a close, as Mississippi Records marks her centenary year with a trove of souvenirs in the form of her first vocal album, recorded during the tumultuous years of the Derg regime as she sang directly into a boombox at her family’s home in Addis Ababa.
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Fire! – ‘Work Song For A Scattered Past’
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Goran Kajfeš Tropiques – ‘Unity In Diversity’
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Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg – ‘Attention’
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Devon Welsh – ‘That’s What We Needed’
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Carlos Niño, Idris Ackamoor and Nate Mercereau – ‘Friends Now’
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Joëlle Leandre & Pascal Contet – ‘Miniatures 9’
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Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – ‘Like the Sun Shines on Meadows’
