Track of the day: ABC by Eskelin, Weber, Griener

From The Pearls by the piano-less trio of Ellery Eskelin, saxophone, Christian Weber, bass, Michael Griener, drums – an album that rags along jostling up against free improv as it proceeds. It is their second studio album and was recorded in Switzerland last year, the first was Sensations of Tone. Eskelin, who Tony Dudley-Evans has promoted to play live in UK, and has a scalding, visceral sound live as heard for instance one time at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, writes in the liner notes quoted by issuing label Intakt: "In making this recording I was struck by the ways in which time can simultaneously be so exacting, so malleable and so multi-dimensional. In these performances you’ll hear free improvisations as well as renditions of classic compositions from an earlier musical form directly addressing time, Ragtime."

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From 2014. Opening v2.0 gently with the heartbeat of ‘Murmuration’, GoGo Penguin drummer Rob Turner languidly nudging the band forward, pianist Chris Illingworth enveloping the listener in a cocoon of euphony, new bassist Nick Blacka’s processed double bass eventually rising to the sense of occasion, a dystopian dissonance ultimately against the arc of a soaring crescendo. Then ‘Garden Dog Barbecue’ provides more detail, and in keeping with their earlier Gondwana album Fanfares (Blacka replacing charismatic bassist Grant Russell) the EST comparison is unavoidable but it’s fast making less sense certainly in the totality of this deeply satisfying new album. Turner’s drum patterns are certainly very different to Magnus Öström’s, merging more with a broken beat sensibility, and the motion doesn’t just track to trip hop and back. The band’s collective musical empathy is stronger already here than on Fanfares, which nonetheless was a fine debut. There’s a certain melancholia in the band’s sound retained that is still appealing, and a certain enhanced karmic side to their interplay where you can measure the emotional impact at certain points. ‘Fort’ simplifies and clarifies the sound while protest song ‘One Percent’ has an eerie beginning that smashes hard, and ‘Home’ introduces new timbres, the drums more metallic.

It’s a tuneful album, Halifax-born Illingworth a versatile and subtle kind of virtuoso who knows how to harness the energy and lost-in-the-music abandon of a 1990s dance music generation evident in the band’s interior soundtrack with Aphex Twin and Massive Attack influences peeking through. ‘The Letter’ was recorded in the dark apparently, a technique also deployed by another New Melodic band Phronesis, yet GoGo Penguin rely less on the delayed gratification of metrical exploration than the Anglo-Scandinavian trio whose latest album Life to Everything hits three weeks after v2.0. ‘To Drown in You’ has lots of surprise detonations, jabbing drums, and rhapsodic effects, with ‘Shock and Awe’ and ‘Hopopono’ drawing an album that could easily stake its claim as the most original and accessible jazz piano trio album of new music to emerge from these shores since the Neil Cowley 2006 album Displaced, to a convincing close. SG

Track of the day: ABC by Eskelin, Weber, Griener

GoGo Penguin, v2.0, Gondwana