Here are A.D. Amorosi’s monthly picks, coming to you the last Tuesday of the month.
Momoko Gill, Momoko (Strut Records)
Momoko Gill’s debut solo album is a soft sculptural marvel.
After working within the glitch electronic movement and its celebrated creators (e.g., Matthew Herbert), this composer-producer, multi-instrumentalist-vocalist incorporated that ice-music’s quirk and ambience as background to a set of jazzily sophisticated songs whose cloudy, quiet vocals and tonic, low sonics are comparable to Astrud Gilberto (breezy but an octave deeper) atop David Sylvian’s Down to Earth score, or if Everything But the Girl captured the marrieds’ solo careers, rather than their union.
If that sounds like a mouthful, listen to Momoko and tell me I’m wrong. The tenderly brushed-and-bruised “No Others,” the warped, fluty and breathy likes of “Rewind/Remind” and “Heavy” with their triple-tracked harmonies and her cymbal-riding drums (yes, she’s a drummer, too), the chilly, electro-stammering “Shadowboxing,” the slipped disc swipe of “Test a Small Area”: perfection. And the simple, spare jazzy piano joy of “Ineffably” with its quieter-than-Eilish-quiver, and its smart, sensual steadied erudition? If there’s an enterprising producer looking to make a name and a million dollars, steal this song. Or just give Momoko a shot.
Neba Solo and Benego Diakité, A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking (Etoile Audio/Nonesuch)
Do yourself a favor before you listen to the whole of A Dijinn and a Hunter Went Walking and its naked “garden demos” CD version of “Djinê Mogo Tiki”: Look at its live YouTube and watch silent Brehima “Benego” Diakité nonchalantly pluckstroke the kamel n’goni with not a motion out of place, while singer-pentatonic Senufo balafon player Neba Solo taps and mallets his melodic idiophone-like percussive instrument. Without doubt, this duo is the Sly & Robbie of Malian jazz.
So then, the rattled-and-hummed beauty of A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking is akin to Sly & Robbie’s 1980, when their melody-driven rhythmic overdrive absolutely made Black Uhuru’s Sinsemilla, Grace Jones’s Warm Leatherette and Serge Gainsbourg’s au Palace their own.
The up-jumping, atmospheric, acoustic instrumental jazz — made richer and moodier on the package’s first CD by the use of mellotron (!?) and the work of female vocalists whose lower register could move furniture from its rumbling lilt — is even more gorgeously displayed on CD 2’s duo-only performances in a mossy Bamako garden. Here, the sparseness of marimba-esque balafon and the thrumming hunter’s harp alone becomes a most unique, foreign-intriguing brand of sketchy nu-jazz.
Triple Blind, Cold Walk (AISA)
Kyle Nasser, Nick Jost, Peter Kronreif and Dov Manski may have day jobs in louder creative music enterprises and Grammy-nominated gigs.
But when the New York–based saxophonist-clarinetist, bassist-organist, drummer-percussionist and Rhodes-analog synthesist play Nasser’s songs, it’s slow gin-ing, masterpiece theater; a place where foghorns and noirish subtone saxes blow chilly (“Bask”); where Zawinul-ish electric pianos dance with slippery, snark-charming reeds and crisply mixed cymbal hits (“Chaotic Eyes”); where meter, rhyme, reason and bowed basslines go out the window with a crash (“Yarn Spin”); and where the woozy, sinister sounding “Sketchy Invention,” “Without Basis” and “Cold Walk” are as aptly titled as they are tap-tapping schematics for individual ways of life.
Plus, this sturdy group of chronically inventive players sound as much of a deeply embedded, fully intertwined unit as the McCaslin-Lindner-Lefebvre-Guiliana-Monder fam behind Bowie’s Blackstar and Maria Schneider’s orchestra does. And that’s saying something beautiful.
Work Money Death, A Portal to Here (ATA Records)
If you’re looking for a celebratory gathering’s most soulfully straining sounds — music insistently bouncing between the squawking and the stirring — call on the UK’s Leeds-based, maudlin-named Work Money Death. Here, members of the Lewis Express, the Sorcerers and Derbyshire saxophonist Nat Birchall’s ensemble combine to craft, eloquently irritating longform improvised tracks knowingly inspired by Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and, more accidentally, by John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards.
Starting with the nearly 13-minute title track, WMD handclap their way through tilted, grooving piano figures, elastic bass lines and the darting honk of a heavily breathing sax for something that sounds as much like a gospel reverie as it does a free-jazz free-for-all. From the first few moments of the opening track “Pain Becomes Prayer and Prayer Becomes a Song,” the link between Alice Coltrane’s 1971 magnum opus Journey into Satchidananda is unmissable.
With a harp’s pluck at its top and a creeping bass below, “Pain Becomes Prayer and Prayer Becomes a Song” could masquerade as Alice and Pharoah’s legendary summit, if only tenor saxophonist Tony Burkill had found the gods within, faster, and gone farther into the heavens (a holy hailstorm that Burkill actually does atonally achieve on “A Dance for the Spirits”).
It’s important to note that their irksomely inspired avant-interplay and mournful mood-swinging comes in tribute to WMD’s late guitarist Chris Dawkins, and that a track such as “Sometimes It’s Death” is meant to radiate the glum (a funereal fumbling piano, a death-rattled sax) and the goodly glowing with its consistent tinkling processional chimes.
Such a charming, sad record, this. JT