Europe Jazz Media Chart - September 2023

High Pulp from Los Angeles is a nice progressive jazz collective. And productive, too. More than a year after their second album Pursuit of Ends (the follow-up to 2018's self-released Bad Juice), the band has just released Days in the Desert. High Pulp's sound may be drenched in jazz, but they just as easily add influences from indie rock, hip-hop and electronic as well as delicious rhythms and grooves, making the sound ever broader, atmospheric and psychedelic. And with each album they manage to greatly enrich that sound again. And with guestplayers like Jeff Parker and Kurt Rosenwinkel it can get even better.

After listening to this album, you may want to learn more about Ottoman Classical Music and Turkish Alevi Spirituals, yet oud player Mehmet Polat's recent album displays nothing but pure creative jazz with outbursts of introspective improvisations...

This album offers astonishingly deep-breathing, freely pulsating, subliminal space-flooding music full of exciting tension carried by a solid heart beat. The music invites us to freedom zones of listening, zones to surrender and loose yourself and at the same time find and remain at yourself. It is astonishing how a rich diversity of musical experiences has been transformed here and emerges from a quietly rotating pole. The music confine itself to indications that lead the floating listener into rich sonic realms and never resolves in over-evident ways. I can even easily sense and imagine how this music would sound with a larger ensemble in an orchestral rendition. There are no obsessive repetitions or trancing attacks. The music renews itself from a deeper lived through experience. It is music of intense serenity and highest Stimmigkeit. This German term contains both: inner coherence and vocalised expression. In short, it is albatross music at highest degree, in its purest gestalt and substance. The music is performed by reed player Klaus Gesing (bass clarinet, soprano sax), Björn Meyer (electric bass) and Samuel Rohrer (drums, modular synthesiser and other electronics). Long garlands of name dropping are not necessary here except maybe two: Björn Meyer will be welcomed by all lovers of Steve Swallow’s electric bass guitar style, and one of the ten album pieces, “Gravity Inn”, is a wonderful nod to Jon Hassell. P.S.: The music can be addictive.

Nisse Sandström Group (Björn J:son Lindh/Mats Hagström/Erik Dahlbäck/Bengt Linnarsson) were jointly active for several years and managed to adopt a collective way of playing where everyone was individually free in every moment of the music, but where the group's commonalities were always the priority and superior to the soloist entrances. Imaginative, open and radical. They set out radical possibilities and perspectives that were previously unknown. In a context and meeting where psychedelic rock, free jazz and contemporary art music could meet. Öppet Ett contains recordings made between 1965 and 1967 and is presented on a recording for the first time through Caprice Records hard diving in the archive.

Flygmaskin's cinematographic music invites you to daydream. If that was their goal - which we have no doubt - he has largely been achieved!

Harold López-Nussa's Blue Note Records debut, produced by Snarky Puppy founder Michael League, showcases the Cuban musician's infectious vitality and virtuosity. Since winning the prestigious Montreux Jazz Piano Competition in 2005, the pianist and composer has steadily built a worldwide following in jazz and beyond over the past two decades.

Young Power made a stir on the Polish jazz scene in the late ’80s  with its fiery mix of  jazz-rock, fusion, rhythm and blues, soul, punk rock, and latin. An untypical big band, it offered more than the music itself. Its spectacular performances were perceived as a manifesto – of freedom. However, after a few years of making the noise and several recordings the group split. Fast forward – nearly three decades later its eponymous debut recording Young Power was rerelased in 2018 on CD in the venerable Polish Jazz series, giving an impulse to revive the group under the banner of Young Power New Edition. In the reformed lineup we can see the charismatic old tigers joining forces with young lions (including one lionesss on saxophone).  Their newest album is a live recording of a striking performance at The Witkacy Theater in Zakopane earlier this year. Freedom features 12 original  pieces, including four flag wavers from their old repertoire. The leader still in charge is Young Power’s founder, flutist, composer and arranger Krzysztof Popek. Old spirit, young blood.

The hour-long album is an excellent example – let’s give the publisher the floor here – of music that escapes pigeonholing. The energy of the ‘Wind Trio’, the mysterious mood of ‘The Sea’, in which one can hear the voice of Anna Lobedan, and the delicacy and spaciousness of ‘Bucolic for WL’ build a picture of a contemporary 21st-century reading of Lutosławski. And the whole is fantastically rounded off by the capital consonance of both ensembles. The artistic fusion and synergy here are downright perfect.