John Fordham's jazz album of the month
Joe Lovano, that giant American elder of jazz reeds-playing, nowadays seems – rather like the equally eminent saxophone master Charles Lloyd – to be simmering all his decades of timeless tunes and exquisite passing phrases down to essences. The 72-year-old Ohio-born sax star and occasional drummer's partners here are Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski's collectively freethinking trio – Homage's shape was formed on extensive tours with them, and a week in 2023 at New York's Village Vanguard club that acted as an impromptu rehearsal.
Song-rooted American jazz-making and give-and-go European free-jazz have become intertwined within Lovano's later-life soundworld. Wasilewski's compatriot Zbigniew Seifert's Love in the Garden is reworked as a rapturous tenor-sax ballad with every soft horn outbreath embraced in silvery keyboard streams. Lovano's Golden Horn evokes the iconic four-note hook of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme before his tenor sax eases in on hints and fragments, then sweeps into fast linear post-bop. There's a driving, McCoy Tyneresque solo from Wasilewski and Lovano switches to hand drums, animatedly joining percussionist Michal Miskiewicz – but there's an exhilarating surprise when the leader whoops back in on the soprano-sax-like Hungarian tárogató.
The title track's opening short-burst figures turn to unaccompanied and free-collective jamming before an enchanting percussion coda; Giving Thanks is a kaleidoscope of figures on unaccompanied tenor sax; and This Side – Catville, an album highlight, deftly balances a snappy short-phrase melody and rolling free-groove. The recording session apparently captured five hours of these exchanges, so with luck a second volume of this hearteningly harmonious and spontaneous music-making is already in the pipeline.
The unobtrusively challenging American drummer Bill Stewart recorded Live at the Village Vanguard (Criss Cross Jazz) in 2023 with the fine Wayne Shorterish Texan saxophonist Walter Smith III and bassist Larry Grenadier. This is an all-original repertoire of Monkish phrasing, lyrical song forms and stretched blues, played with a relish that confirms the enduring mileage of those materials. The fast imagination and soulfulness of young UK saxist Emma Rawicz scintillatingly partners with the explosive orchestral breadth of piano star Gwilym Simcock on the duo set Big Visit (ACT). There's a quirkier but just as compatible union in Ronny Graupe's Szelest, a trio featuring the fragile and precise Swiss singer Lucia Cadotsch along with innovative German guitarist Graupe and UK pianist/composer Kit Downes. On the album Newfoundland Tristesse (BMC), Cadotsch is alert and inventive as she makes old-school material – even Stardust and I Surrender Dear are included here – converse creatively with sometimes implacably independent partners. It's a set that will grow her status as a jazz-leaning musical one-off.
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