Jonathan Barber & Vision Ahead, In Motion ***1/2

Quite a body of work built up since the dread year of Lockdown four years ago. That hangover sense of spiritual malaise that has became a defining characteristic of the years since is ably captured by US drummer Jonathan Barber. Playing his own tunes and recording these on In Motion over three days just as summer changed into autumn last year the sound is painterly and measured. Barber's band goes for the meditative approach without being morbid, hazy or just doomy for the sake of it. No one poses at being avant-garde but what's on the recording is very advanced creatively. You get groove a bit organically on a track like 'Can't Call It' where there's extra percussion from Nelson Bello added. But this doesn't tumble into being nebulously vampy nu jazz at all. That's refreshing. It's far more core, the compositional style a bit like Terence Blanchard's or Kendrick Scott's. The players give the very hooky 'Liberty' a couple of goes - there's a reprise at the end - and that piece is a welcome return. Matt Knoegel on tenor saxophone doesn't adopt the usual role of sax taking over and everybody falling in behind because there's good use made of all the players in the writing and contoured to the shape of the tunes. Take Taber Gable's piano lead on the anthemic 'Help Us All Rise'. Andrew Renfroe on guitar reminds us a lot of Nir Felder in the sound. Gable and Renfroe were on Barber's last record Poetic. The bassist here is Matt Dwonszyk who was on Barber's Live at Jazz Standard and Legacy Holder. Albums since Lockdown have often been very different to what went immediately before given their greater levels of introspection and new ways of looking at the world. The music has changed. Nothing is the same. Barber's cuts journey deep and mine both emotion and there's flow, a commodity as precious as cobalt. As a hack to exile ennui by delving into its undertow, figuring out the anomie it can engender and then working things out, In Motion is ideal and written in such immaculate jazz code that does not need the crutch of the past at all. There's no sense of looking back.