Very notable this week because they made their online debut as a four-piece last night via a dice.fm stream playing from Recaptures Minihi present a sound that is unusual and distinctive. I harbour a theory that bands that become big do not correspond closely to the rules of a genre but become attached anyway to a certain community who habitually gravitate towards a certain one no matter how heretical the band that they have latched on to happen to be. So that partly explains outliers like Get the Blessing, Portico Quartet, Neil Cowley trio, Kokoroko. It may very well happen with Minihi and certainly this very impressive showing leads me to think that they will be a band we all know about before too long when touring resumes. As a jazz listener I get what they play instantly but it is not jazz that they are playing at all in the sense of close or any adherence to the obvious stylistic attributes of any of jazz's many traditions apart from one: a very strict emphasis on cross-rhythms. (However it is interesting that percussionist Zands has a jazz background.) These cross-rhythms, and this is an immaculate virtuoso rhythm band given that you have a kit drummer and two percussionists led often by Duggan from the mallets or following the Agnes Obel player's vocalised enchanting, are absolutely vital at the heart of their sound. What they do isn't about any variant on minimalism if you just see them as a classical contemporary outfit because they don't fit that billing either. It also isn't anything to do with groove. Their material is very striking and almost metronomically precise, I like the use of hammered dulcimer best of all, certainly there is a strong emphasis on structure that helps shape what they do and so because of a framework in the writing the tunes actually have a narrative to them that you can discern. I am not talking about the back story to the tunes which to me is not as interesting a defining factor although they provide a lot of colour. Duggan and Zands explained these articulately in chats between performances in last night's stream. The Minihi sound isn't naturalistic in the sense that it can easily paint a picture even if it is of a journey on a bullet train or a tender last walk because it is abstract enough not to demand knowledge about what inspired the tunes. In other words it is not programme music. Next departure point will be when the band play in front of an in-the-same-actual-space audience. It is blindingly obvious beyond the fractured kind of Alaska that is experiencing performance virtually that when the time is right they will go down a storm. SG
Minihi: Calie Hough, top left, Louise Anna Duggan, Zands, Jay Chakravorty. Photo: Dice.FM stream
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