ALBUMS: Jazz 2 BY DES COWLEY MIRKO GUERRINI AND ANDREA KELLER GENIUS LOCI: LIVE IN FLORENCE Independent, digital release
LILLIAN ALBAZI AFTER-IMAGE Independent, Vinyl & Digital release
AUSTRALIAN ART ORCHESTRA CLOSED BEGINNINGS AAO 007, CD & Digital release
LOUISE DENSON GROUP NOVA NOVA Dengor 003, CD & digital release
Since moving permanently to Australia in 2013, Italian saxophonist Mirko Guerrini has been a regular fixture on the local jazz scene, fronting his own ensembles and making up one third of Torrio!, his bona fide supergroup with Paul Grabowsky and Niko Schauble. Genius Loci, his duets with pianist Andrea Keller, was recorded live in September 2019 in the magnificent Basilica de Santa Croce in Florence, the city of Guerrini’s birth. He acknowledges it was his first performance in Florence since his father’s death, and, affectingly, he chose to perform playing his father’s 1966 Selmer Mark VI, thereby stamping a deeply personal character on the concert. The album opens with Keller’s ‘Sleep Cycles’, which originally appeared on her Transients recordings. With its melancholic pianistic yearning, over which Guerrini beautifully improvises, it bears comparison with the music of Keith Jarrett’s legendary European Quartet. Next up is Keller’s ‘Broken Reflections’, her pensive meditation on her own father, taken from her solo album Journey Home. Guerrini’s sax, barely more than a whisper, is saturated with a deep romanticism, full of longing. Guerrini’s ‘Elegy for Stefano’, dedicated to the late saxophonist Stefano Bartolini, and composed the day his friend died, is a gorgeous lament, his sax invoking pain and loss. The standout piece is Keller’s ‘Missed Opportunities’, its near-classical piano theme underpinning Guerrini’s slow-burn solo, full of winding passages, as it steers its way toward resolution. Throughout this performance, Guerrini and Keller demonstrate a perfect simpatico, navigating these delicate compositions at a leisurely and unhurried pace. The results are like small jewels, polished to perfection. 94
Vocalist Lillian Albazi has been making waves on the local jazz scene ever since debuting her quintet at the 2016 Melbourne International Jazz Festival. With After-Image, she has delivered her first album, a solid workout comprising mostly jazz standards, rounded out with a genuine outlier – Rowland S. Howard’s broodingly intense ‘Autoluminescent’. The elevenminute opener ‘You don’t know what love is / Lullaby of Birdland’ highlights the album’s strengths: deceptively simple arrangements, ever-so-cool vamps, and Albazi voice, mature and sultry, gliding effortlessly over a minimal percussive beat. Oscar Neyland’s ostinato bass provides a subtle urgency, while drummer Luke Andresen propels the music with a light and busy touch. Saxophonist Shaun Rammers, meanwhile, blowing equal parts cool and hot, channels the warm, lyrical tones of Stan Getz. On ‘Gentle Rain’, Albazi dips into the laconic sun-drenched world of Luiz Bonfá’s Bossa Nova, her vocals languidly cruising to the gentle rhythms of Henry Davis’s Jobim-like guitar. Albani’s rendition of ‘My Funny Valentine’ features guest pianist Tony Gould, whose unadorned notes strive for the simplicity heard on Chet Baker’s classic version. Like Chet, Albazi inhabits every inch of the song, her vocals dreamy and fragile. Jimmy Van Heusen’s ‘Come Fly with Me’ is taken at a gentle clip, Neyland’s swinging bass shadowing Albazi’s lilting voice as she bends and stretches her words to fit the melody. Albazi concludes the album with a stark reading of ‘Autoluminescent’, a genuine Australian classic, digging deep inside the song’s despairing lyrics. While early days, this haunting finale suggests one future direction her work might take.
Jazz and poetry boast a long tradition, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat poets, from Amiri Baraka to Cecil Taylor’s performative recitations. While the Australian Art Orchestra has previously incorporated texts – found or otherwise – into its compositional practice, Closed Beginnings represents the AAO’s first collaboration with a poet, in this case Zimbabwe-born Australian poet Tariro Mavondo. For this recording, AAO trumpeters Reuben Lewis and Peter Knight, employing a range of pedals, percussion, electronics, tape loops and synthesizers, have designed dense soundscapes as a backdrop for Mavondo’s four extended poems. ‘We too, Roar’, with its enigmatic refrain ‘deep down in the belly of the beast’, was composed in response to Melbourne’s 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. Mavondo’s words, augmented by a string trio, invoke something of the isolation and fear generated by a global pandemic: ‘can you hear in the / distance / a large steamboat / and as it nears / arms reaching out to a / sorry world’. Throughout Closed Beginnings, the AAO’s approach to jazz and spoken word sets it apart from much other jazz poetry. Rather than melding improvising bass or saxophone with spoken rhythms, Lewis and Knight have instead opted to contrive atmospherics that render closely the prevailing mood or tenor of the poems. As such, this music is more Eno than jazz, a series of minimalist and ambient soundworlds that psychically, rather than rhythmically, mirror Mavondo’s words. It makes for an intriguing - and in this case successful – experiment, further evidence of the AAO’s on-going interest in breaking down musical barriers.
Before migrating to Australia in 1999, Canadian-born pianist and composer Louise Denson studied with heavyweights Paul Bley and George Russell in Boston. That’s some education. Since then, she’s carved out a successful career in Brisbane, lecturing at the Queensland Conservatorium. Nova Nova, her fourth release as the Louise Denson Group, serves up eight new compositions performed by her trio of Helen Russell on bass and Paul Hudson on drums, expanded with saxophonist James Sandon and trumpeter Lachlan McKenzie on several tracks. The album kicks off with ‘You Said’, ushering in one of those classic Blue Note riffs beloved by Freddie Hubbard or Joe Henderson. Denson’s piano is cool and muted, while McKenzie’s trumpet skips in and around the beat. With its buoyant feel, driven by Hudson’s measured percussion, it sets the tone for the album. ‘Parting’ sees the piano trio rolling out a delicate refrain, the lines of Denson’s piano searching and contemplative, calling to mind early Keith Jarrett. ‘Samba Lucia’ introduces an upbeat Latin feel, the mellifluous and dancing quality of McKenzie’s sax echoing Stan Getz’s classic Bossa Nova sides. The title track could be a soundtrack to a film noir, evoking streetlights, wet pavements, and shadows, its haunting theme playing out like a doomed love affair. ‘Moving On’ finds the band back in Blue Note territory, recalling the boldness and fluidity of Wayne Shorter’s mid-sixties sound. While there is nothing ground-breaking about Denson’s album, it reflects the maturity and confidence of a pianist and composer whose lyricism and melodic import is always front and centre.
