Family Band‘s latest (and self-titled) release, their third since forming in 2015, finds them further exploring their interactions as a quartet and how personal ideas form, and then coalesce when presented to a democracy fully at ease with one another and anxious to express the diversity that jazz welcomes currently.
Over the seven pieces presented here, the players take the basic idea delivered by one member and add fire and energy to it. This causes an extraordinary vibrancy that feels like it blows through the last seventy years of jazz history, alighting briefly and then flitting off, always propelled by the supple and engaging rhythm section.
The joyful bass- and drum-led strut of opener “Bastard Gentlemen” is cool yet bustling and has a swing that sax player Riley Stone-Lonergan uses as a stage to turn his instrument inside out. The handover to Kim Macari‘s trumpet is seamless and further limit-pushing is undertaken. The rolling drums and frenetic bass action somehow urge the horns on, like a mirror held up showing the truth and allowing it to shin through. The longer “Monty” is slower and more melancholy, the drums textural and the feeling is more thoughtful, more provocative, the sax heady and enthralled, sweeping the exquisite bass playing up into its arms. They play around with motifs like threads in a maze, dropping brief snippets and running into the distance before appearing once again, somehow returning, often unexpectedly, but always welcome.They like playing with gravity as if there are elliptical orbits, instruments swinging ever further away from the initial motif, only to cause uproar as the atmosphere is breached and they lurch past, the gradual attraction luring them ever closer. Things here are visceral but considered, the solo bass manipulation of “Changing Reflection” slowing things down, stripping them away, the monochrome palpable, a sawed dynamism heading into echoic grandeur.
The room plays its part, cocooning the players and allowing the experiments to unfold. The cold war paranoia of “Deft But Bereft” allying a 1950s radio broadcast with a mutant hybrid of protest jazz and blazing rock’n’roll, the emerging hysteria nicely framing the apocalyptic imagery. The sheer momentum that runs through a lot of the album is a testament to the rhythm section, a mania that excites and flusters in equal measure, the cymbal taps on “Mistake Not” like the nervous tic of an accused man. The sax on the other hand wails with the kind of freedom we can usually only dream of and gives an amazing contrast to the mystical absorption.The New Music Of The Spirits” has a kind of end of day reckoning, a series of dusky manoeuvres circling the sandy sculptures of an unknown place, windblown and empty; a hint of the east, but not one that you can rely on. It feels as though it is playing with your expectations, leading you on a dusty goose chase, but one which can’t prepare you for the bruised heartbreak of closer “One Road”, Kim’s desolate words pulling at the threads of your jumper until everything starts to unravel.
It is an unexpected end to an album that is full of surprises, but one which is ever open to interpretation, demanding revisiting and never disappointing when you do. It is hard to believe this was recorded in forty-eight hours. Is there more lurking under their easy exterior? On the strength of this, we can only hope so.-Mr Olivetti-
