Cloudmakers Five
Traveling Pulse

Jim Hart is a British jazz musician and is generally regarded as the greatest contemporary vibraphonist. In 2010, he formed his main project (initially born in collaboration with Ralph Alessi), the Cloudmakers Trio, with bassist Michael Jarnish and drummer Dave Smith, a trio with a decidedly unconventional composition that for Jim constituted a real workshop to experiment with every possible development in the sound of the vibraphone within the dynamics of a jazz music trio. At the end of 2015, he decided to expand the project with Austrian guitarist Hannes Rieples and one of the young stars of the French jazz scene, saxophonist Antonin-Tri Hoang, and thus adopted the new name of Cloudmakers Five.

The first release of the new quintet came out two days ago for Whirlwind Records. The album is titled "Traveling Pulse" and captures the live performance of two dates (March 10/11, 2017) recorded live at London's Vortex Jazz Club at the end of a long tour that began in the USA and ended right in Great Britain. Composed of six compositions conceived and built around the central core constituted by the vibraphone's sound, it is precisely this feature that gives the sound a certain hypnotic character, and the structures of the pieces, distant from noisier avant-jazz projects or the typical free-jazz based on improvisation and a certain expression of freedom in the compositions, have instead a circular character and follow what we can consider as a kind of invisible trail. The sounds seem to literally swarm all around the environment that surrounds us in a uniqueness that keeps them linked together even when the compositions appear closer to free-jazz ("The Road (For Ed)" or "The Exchange") or when every sound would seem almost willing to literally detach itself from the rest of the composition and then is instead somehow "captured" and brought back on the right track.

There is a particular strength in this album and in the sound of this quintet that Jim Hart wants to be unbound from any other project he is currently involved in and which he considers primarily inspired by visual experiences that are then largely derived from his movements and his impressions during travels. It is a vision of jazz music that is almost landscapist. Moreover, he stated, this is also a consequence of his life choice: leaving the United Kingdom and moving to France and specifically to Alsace instead of the intense Parisian scene (similar to that of London, of which he has been a part for many years) has been a revealing experience. A sort of refuge in the mountains where one can breathe different air and look at things from a new perspective.