April round-up
In the late-1950s, while the teenage Charles Lloyd was learning his trade on the Memphis blues circuit, a 17-year-old Carla Bley was working as a cigarette girl in New York’s Birdland jazz club. That listening education was the foundation for all that came after, from composing for large ensembles to playing in small groups like her long-standing trio with electric bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard. There’s something special about hearing a big band composer/pianist playing in an exposed trio setting: it seems to distil the performance. Life Goes On comprises three characteristically pungent Bley tunes, each one having three parts. The theme in the blue-washed title suite (inspired by a recent illness) is picked over by Bley, before Sheppard’s nimble tenor knits it up; Swallow’s signature electric bass patterns here are hypnotic. ‘Copycat’ is led out by pure, upper register curlicues from Sheppard’s horn while Bley mingles with Swallow’s sonorous bass lines. A masterclass in immersive, smallgroup jazz. (ECM 2669 ★★★★★)
Jazz has always been intertwined with the civil rights movement but it came to the fore in the Sixties with artists like Max Roach and Charles Mingus voicing their frustrations over racial inequality. Bassist Christian Mcbride’s The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons is a timely if ultimately sad reminder of a struggle that continues today. It means his majestic four-part suite for big band is a work in constant progress. First performed live in 2008, this studio update features dramatic musical settings for the words of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Muhammad
Ali and Barack Obama. Mcbride’s standing in the jazz world is reflected in the stellar studio lineup of narrators and musicians he’s assembled, and they combine to produce an emotionally charged extended work. (Mack Avenue MAC 1082 ★★★★)
Consciousness and sustainability inform Danish bassist Jasper Hoiby’s trio album, Planet B. The bass/sax/drums format usually packs a punch, and tenorist Josh Arcoleo plus drummer Marc
Michel really go for it. Like Mcbride, Hoiby has added some spoken word recordings to articulate his message. But the roiling interplay of three fired up soloists is what drives the leader’s heartfelt message home. Uk-based Arcoleo is particularly impressive, conjuring up the athletic lyricism of a young Sonny Rollins, the original pianoless trio specialist. This is the first of four political albums in the pipeline that promise to open ears and minds in equal measure. (Edition EDN 1149 ★★★★)
Trumpeter Byron Wallen meditates on questions of identity and what it means to belong on his new album Portrait. It’s a vivid collage of sound that reflects Wallen’s interest in world music and his work in the community: the inclusion of a primary school choir on three numbers is anything but corny here. I detect the influence of experimentalist horn player
Jon Hassell and his gauzy ‘fourth world’ music in some of Wallen’s compositions. (Twilight Jaguar
TJCD 3 ★★★★)
The human condition is less of a concern for Glasgow-based world jazz outfit Mezcla. Shoot the Moon, the young septet’s debut album, has a more mainstream, party-time attitude. The pacey, seamless arrangements, neatly spliced with sharp-edged improvisation, deliver instant gratification. (Ubuntu Music UBU0047 ★★★★)