The saxophonist Jorga Mesfin grew up in a house full of jazz records, immersed in the melodies of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and the organist Jimmy Smith, the dolorous vocalist and krar player Kassa Tessema who was the focus of one of those Éthiopiques volumes which recuperated the efforts of Amha Records and Kaifa Records during the golden age of Ethiopian music and brought Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou to global attention, but most of all the percussive vibrations and syncretic fusions of the great instrumentalist Mulatu Astatke. A somewhat reluctant recipient of the first Éthiopiques volume devoted to a single musician, the vibraphonist and conga drummer Astatke is regarded as the father of Ethio-jazz for combining the pentatonic scale and asymmetrical rhythms of traditional Amharic music with Western forms and his penchant for Latinate percussion, the elder statesman coming to serve as something of a mentor to Mesfin as he embarked on his own professional career at the age of just seventeen years old.
Mesfin has collaborated with other Ethiopian icons like Mahmoud Ahmed and Aster Aweke as a longtime resident of Astatke’s stylish bar the African Jazz Village in Addis Ababa, where on a typical night he might blend the opening chords of ‘My Favorite Things’ by John Coltrane with the tender strains of Ahmed and Gerawork Nekatibeb’s folk classic ‘Wey Fikir’. His sister Munit Mesfin is also a musician, an acclaimed singer best known for her partnership with the German guitarist Jörg Pfeil. Having initially studied the piano, Mesfin’s sound on the saxophone is equal parts Coltrane, the Ethiopian tenor player Getatchew Mekurya who bent his instrument to emulate shellela warrior chants, and Emahoy whose spellbinding runs sit somewhere between the winding repetitions and waif melodies of Erik Satie and the tremulous blues of Billy Strayhorn and Ellington, earning her her the dubious title of the ‘honky-tonk nun’ while she remains lauded as one of the most distinctive pianists in all of contemporary classical music.
In 2004 while studying at Emory University in the United States, the aspiring musician founded the fusion band Wudasse with Fasil Wuhib on bass, Teferi Assefa on drums, Ahsa Ahla on other percussion and Dale Saunders on the guitar, with their solitary album Selam released in 2006. A couple of years later Jorga Mesfin worked alongside Vijay Iyer on the score for Teza, an Ethiopian coming-of-age narrative which depicts the creeping horrors and crushing brutality of the Derg regime, whose music won awards at the Carthage Film Festival and the Dubai International Film Festival. He was part of the Kafa Beanz who blended Ethiopian hip hop and neo soul and featured on a collaborative record by Takana Miyamoto and Kirk Whalum, and he has continued to compose for films including the athletics drama Min Alesh? and Enchained, a legal drama which evokes old oral traditions while dabbling in magical realism. Yet his new album The Kindest One, a reworked and remastered version of a suite which was recorded in Atlanta and released as The Kind Ones back in 2007, arrives now on the Addis Ababa and Stockholm outpost Muzikawi billed as his solo debut.
Playing saxophone and keys, on ‘Thanksgiving (ምስጋና)’, the opening track from The Kindest One, elegant cascades of piano flow down over the slippery, roiling and runaway patterns of Ali Eric Barr’s djembe drum, before Mesfin’s soprano and the percussive shakers of Teferi Assefa give the track a celestial shimmer. On the brief follow-up ‘The Portal (ዘ ፖርታል)’ smears of fairground accordion courtesy of Takana Miyamoto ratchet over the resounding echo of a kick drum, and ‘Longing (ሎንጊንግ)’ carries the melody while upping the tempo, a slinky groove built upon the shifting sands of the djembe and a plummy, springy bass line as Mesfin’s saxophone airs a flighty and wafting discursion.
While Mamaniji Azanyah plucks the double bass with aplomb, ‘Pilgrimage (ጉዞ)’ foregrounds the electric bass of Fasil Wuhib, whose iterative downwards tread is accompanied by a cortege of increasingly arhythmic hand clap percussion. Then the title track of The Kindest One opens with a specious soprano glimmer, soft-brushed percussive eddies, spare bass throbs and the whistling of winds, a watery rush over silt and reeds, the pouring out of one’s cup in an act of deep benevolence and communal whimsy. The horn becomes ever more ebullient and emphatic as percussive rolls and clatters plus the gentle nods of the bass imbue the track with a bluesy undercurrent.
The soprano is more moodily inquisitive on ‘Tizita (ትዝታ)’, the Amharic name for a musical style which trades in themes of nostalgia whether it be childhood memories, lost loves or a severed connection to once treasured homes and lands. Venturing down alleyways and pressing into the corners of the composition while a trumpet skirts behind in fading counterpoint, droning organ keys buttress the brass until a walking bass line scatters the streets leaving the horn to play a more restrained, somewhat elegiac melody on the margins. ‘Spring Water (የምንጭ ውሃ)’ is another slinkily gushing track, with claves tapping out a rhythm and chimes keeping time as the woodwinds swoop and soar over the canvas, Mesfin adopting a highly lyrical tone through open voicings as the piece shrugs to a close.
And ‘Ye Abay Gizo (የአባይ ጉዞ)’ which closes The Kindest One is another arabesque, where the high wail of the soprano saxophone is soon accompanied by serpentine shakers and the stately yet queasy throb of an accordion as drum rolls and the djembe rumble on in the distance. A trip down the Nile characterised by the stacking of chairs and a seasick disembarkation, after the communal throb and throng of the album ‘Ye Abay Gizo (የአባይ ጉዞ)’ stands as a solitary call to prayer, striking a note of ominous portent as Jorga Mesfin and The Kindest One depart having left a searing impression.
On his recent album New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz the vaunted pianist Matthew Shipp seemed to a complete a long-gestating arc towards classical forms, hammering refrains like Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major into the roiling textures of ‘Non Circle’ and steering in the direction of baroque counterpoint as his tall and plangent lines tangled deftly with the bows and scrapes of Michael Bisio’s bass and Newman Taylor Baker’s dextrous percussion. Meanwhile the sometimes combustible free jazz saxophonist Ivo Perelman has taken a more reserved and lyrical bent on his latest works, eliding the labours of the day and tentatively Embracing the Unknown alongside Chad Fowler on the stritch and saxello with Reggie Workman on the double bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums comprising a legendary rhythm section, then slipping into a mellower groove alongside fresh collaborative partners Mark Helias and Tom Rainey for the samba-licked spiritualism of Truth Seeker.
Back together again for a Magical Incantation, here Shipp stretches out a hand to the listener and Perelman alike while the saxophonist readily dusts down his trusty old carpet, for a record which retains some of the languor and ardour of their most recent pieces of work with nods to a few old jazz standards. The opening ‘prayer’ for instance is redolent of the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach wipeout ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, while elsewhere on tracks like ‘rituals’ and ‘lustihood’ Perelman’s tenor wafts, scampers or plays short vertical stabs as Shipp feeds more of the melody. On ‘sacred rituals’ slow drags of saxophone become sustained howls as Shipp hammers out his chords, their improvisatory flair carrying a self-contained eloquence on the two lengthier closing tracks ‘vibrational essence’ and the title.
This is their umpteenth collaboration, stretching by my count to more than forty records in all formats since Cama de Terra with William Parker and the duo album Bendito of Santa Cruz back in the mid-nineties. Shipp, who would know better than most, regards Magical Incantation as one of their best yet, adding:
This record is a major major statement in jazz history. It is the height of the work I’ve done with Ivo and the height of what can be done in a duo setting with piano.
The influential pairing of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke as Gastr del Sol, whose output veered from cracked post-rock to chamber pop and from lilting jazz to brackish or slanting drone while bearing skewed traces of musique concrète, primitive guitar and glitch electronics, unpack their archive some twenty-five years since their demise courtesy of studio outtakes and their very last live performance. The singer and instrument builder Olith Ratego, whose five-stringed okoddo is based on a classical Kenyan lyre, and the percussionist Sven Kacirek are joined by Angel Bat Dawid for one of the standout tracks from Negore, as pitched bars and a thrum of strings are endowed with a winnowing quality, the jazz requiems of Dawid fortifying the dodo strains of Ratego, who sings in a style common to Luo festivities. And from the port city of Kochi, the Cochin String Orchestra swing with a stately grace for Seljuk Rustum’s performance space, community centre and residency the Forplay Society.
Recorded remotely between Chicago, Honolulu and the city of Columbia in central Missouri, the trio of Jessica Ackerley, Chaz Prymek and Nick Turner skirt their various reputations for wave forms and sheer atonality, rich ambient warmth, enveloping blankets of white noise and a kind of pastoral lyricism as their album All Hope With Sleeping Minds opens with an all-Americana take on the hollowed out soundscapes of Grouper, conjured through the reverberating canyons of their triptych guitars and a lap steel which doubles as percussion. These torchlight excursions, late night forays as a pair of tail lights flash down the highway, moonlit and dusk-clad, and fading howls just keep getting more spectral until the penultimate track with its queasy Mellotron plays out like an abiding lullaby. Roving within a dream or staggering like the restless wanderings of a somnambulist, with foreboding the closer ‘It’s All Different Now’ captures some of that scorched earth, a liminal space between waking and death which one might describe as la petite mort, a shockwave and its tremulous aftermath.
At the centre of his new album Dark Times, the track ‘Étouffée’ is a sultry example of the type of thing which Vince Staples does best, at once yanked along by a loping beat and stage managing the whole enterprise with a wide purview and a tight grip, stranded in the intersection and commandeering a pair of battle ropes. The name for a Cajun dish of shellfish over rice, the rickety sway of the drums and synths serves as a perfect backdrop for his voice, which is both expressive in its world weariness and deadened from anxiousness, a pervasive sense of alienation which characterises his work and is ensconced in the chorus to ‘Étouffée’ when he sings ‘In the ghetto, I’m a martian’ in chorus with himself. A potted personal history as Staples chronicles his own headspace and surveys our prevailing social atmosphere, on ‘Little Homies’ he says ‘Life hard but I go harder’ as both summary and vow before Santigold proffers a sun-kissed pantheism.
Hit-Boy, Big Hit and The Alchemist throw a coming-out party of sorts for HitgirlLENA, keeping it all in the family over a classic beat in the form of Gank Move’s dank nineties phantasm ‘Murderer’. And drawing on texts written by women between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the composer and double bassist Carla Gonzàlez Ferrer accompanied by Eva Fernàndez on the soprano saxophone, Haizea Martiartu on the alto, Cristina Sunyer on the French horn, Alba Pujals on trombone and Andrea González behind the drum set extemporises a daily practice of seeking and beholding, affirming the ‘all shall be well’ and the Revelations of Divine Love of the English anchoress Julian of Norwich.
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Gastr del Sol – ‘The Seasons Reverse’ (Live)
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Cochin String Orchestra – ‘Making Two Flames One’
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Odd Okoddo – ‘Timneyore’ (feat. Angel Bat Dawid)
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Jorga Mesfin – ‘The Kindest One (ከሁሉ የላቀው ደግ)’
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Carla Gonzàlez Ferrer – ‘Julian of Norwich’
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Jessica Ackerley, Chaz Prymek and Nick Turner – ‘Sleeping Minds’
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Big Hit, Hit-Boy and The Alchemist – ‘Gank Move’ (feat. HitgirlLENA)
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