Wbird the London jazz festival ran on-line ultimate in 2020, a tantalizing livestreamed efficiency by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling spotlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. Chances are high you’ll perchance name her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social concerns. However Campiche is too unprecedented of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her unusual album, the unaccompanied Unstated, confirms better than ever.
Campiche’s extra-musical agenda here’s a celebration of sisterhood, dedicated to ladies in public and internal most lives who cling impressed her. The outlet Nameless is built around a Virginia Woolf quote – “for many of history, ‘nameless’ was a girl” – repeated by a chorus of girls’s voices in completely different languages building to a clamour. Grisélidis Réal is named after the Swiss artist and creator who took her physical and mental lifestyles to every precipice, including sex work, expressed in gently lyrical harp traces throughout the spooky sounds of footsteps clicking on pavements.
Rosa is a lilting harp melody dedicated to the weary secure to the bottom of of migrant workers, the rhythm-moving Andréa Bescond a lissome tribute to the French actor and director and on Maman du Ciel, Campiche mesmerisingly makes employ of her in- and out-breaths as the rhythm pattern. Unstated is the least jazzy of the worthy Campiche’s ventures so some distance, but when she didn’t inhabit a world of improvisers, she may by no methodology cling imagined it like this.
Moreover out this month
Novel York avant-jazz pianist Craig Taborn surfaced within the gradual 90s with leaders including Tim Berne and Steve Coleman, but his have work has blossomed within the Twenty first century. With Dream Archives (ECM), in a trio with cello megastar Tomeka Reid and percussionist/composer Ches Smith, he embraces rapid-moving collective free-swing, smouldering lyrical originals and two heartfelt tributes (Paul Motian’s Mumbo Jumbo and Geri Allen’s When Kabuya Dances). The trumpeter Airelle Besson, a luminary of French jazz, extra nurtures her prolonged relationship with accordionist Lionel Suárez on Blossom (Bretelles Prod/Papillon Jaune), a mainstream but comely mix of jaunty and gentle originals, and affectionate covers of Carla Bley’s Ida Lupino and the Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays song Au Lait. And proficient young UK pianist/composer Noah Stoneman continues his standard upward push with Dance at Zero, ingenious transformations of his minuscule compositions into prosperous improvisations within the corporate of rapid-rising young saxophonist Emma Rawicz, bassist Freddie Jensen and UK jazz drum maestro James Maddren.