JAZZ TRACK

| Parallax | Edition/Planet EDN 1070

The clarinet has faded from favour as a front-line jazz instrument, but John Shand has found a rare CD release that shows what music lost…

Phronesis views jazz from a different angle. Part of the Anglo-Danish band’s secret has been solving the problem of sonic transparency when piano (Ivo Neame), bass (Jasper Hoiby) and drums (Anton Eger) are played together, whether improvising or enunciating superbly-crafted compositions. In most such trios the cymbals wash out the piano’s overtones while the piano swamps the bass. There’s no crime in having musical foregrounds and backgrounds, but the members of Phronesis have found how to bring all three instruments into equal focus for a remarkable proportion of the time, so that the music magic lies in the micro-interaction. Parallax is the finest iteration of this ideal so far. Aided by exquisite recording the bass can loom monumentally from the piano’s dancing agitation and the intricate, dramatic puzzle being enacted by the drums. voices in these six unedited improvisations they tend to concentrate on creating dark and even sinister contexts in which the clarinet can suddenly flare like an open-flame torch, or in which its eeriness is compounded. Collectively shunning the constraints of idiom, including the clichés of free improvisation, the trio alternates between sparseness and intricacy, and between abstraction and a profound humanism.