In 2017, the Bath festival commissioned the delicately experimental Anglo-Polish singer, violinist, and improviser/composer Alice Zawadzki to form a trio for a one-off gig – the only condition being that her new partners had to be musicians she had long wanted to play with. Her choices were music-theatre pianist/composer and Bach-reimagining improviser Fred Thomas and prize-winning jazz/classical double-bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado. The collaboration stuck: seven years on, this beautiful collection of songs, drawing on European, Latin American and Sephardic Jewish sources, is their official recorded debut.
Zawadzki’s intuitions about how fluidly they might fuse their very different cultural resources were confirmed as their new repertoire formed. In 2022, Thomas, already an ECM artist, pitched the songs for Za Górami (the title means Behind the Mountains) to label boss Manfred Eicher and the trio recorded these tracks in the ethereal-sounding Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, Switzerland, each containing an absorbing story (all translated in the accompanying booklet).
On the Judaeo-Spanish traditional song Suéltate as Cintas (Untie the Ribbons), a ticking piano hook and softly inviting bass melody usher in Zawadzki’s spellbound sensuality before Thomas and Mullov-Abbado gently entwine beneath deep violin chords. Hymnal vocal beginnings intensify over rising and falling bass and piano pulse on Venezuelan composer Simón Díaz’s Tonada de Luna Llena, and the Polish title track opens with Zawadzki’s cry of a girl’s bid for freedom before brittle free-jazzy treble jangles and spookily racing bass figures suggest a dancing tumult and a pensive descent. Thomas’s setting for James Joyce’s Gentle Lady wraps a bass pulse and liquid piano streams around Zawadzki’s acceptance of ephemerality, and Arvoles Lloran por Lluvias is the stoical lament of a departing soldier leaving happiness behind.
Za Górami is mostly a slow-moving programme of beautifully conveyed wistful songs, but only exploratory and jazz-immersed musicians could have delivered them this way.
Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
Also out this month
Breaking the Shell (Red Hook) intriguingly joins up guitarist Bill Frisell, former Cecil Taylor percussion original Andrew Cyrille and the UK’s Kit Downes on pipe organ. Spacey, bleepy abstract voyages, softly surging free-jazz, electronic storms that gather against deep organ chords meet tender guitar ballads and soft melodic ascents over Cyrille’s delicately detailed percussion. For meditative free-improv listeners more than Frisell’s country-Americana fans maybe, but gripping if you let go. Young Los Angeles experimental jazz and Indian-classical vocalist Sharada Shashidhar unveils how her playful, pitch-vaulting voice – reminiscent of Kate Bush – and ensemble nimbleness points to a creative, style-splicing future on Soft Echoes (Leaving Records). And exciting jazz-funk pianist Neil Cowley’s many fans will cheer his reunion with his old acoustic trio on Entity (Hide Inside), a signature collection of punchy hooks and evocatively dreamy reveries – the smoky, Spanish-tinged slow-burner, Marble, sets the scene.
Source: theguardian.com
