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Rating: Alright, let's get started.
1) 'Flipper' is the beginning of the CD; brief (2:37) and serves as a very delicate and timeless intro. Sleepy sax phrasing and lazy yet defined Fender piano. Scattered notes of double bass and light cymbals hover in the air.
Straight afterwards comes 2) 'Lemmy Caution': a wonderful track that seems to be drawn directly from the best Pink Floyd productions of the late seventies: a looped introduction of Rhodes with delay acts as a carpet for the theme whispered by the sax. Gradually, the piece unfolds and grows. Anyone with doubts about what jazz is today... well, from now on they'll have many more! The sax continues scratching painfully on the edge of this restless and ghostly loop that both troubles and fascinates you at the same time. Final crescendo like in a bolero, ending with an orgasm that includes a very subtle and melodic sustained guitar. Fade-out ending for closure.
3) 'A Messy Business' is also a piece of absolute atmosphere. And very original. Teddy Kumpel's guitar, a tacit guest on this record, converses in the background with taste and measure, the result of long experience, maturity, and a sense of "song". It takes a lot more humility and maturity to play a couple of scattered notes in the right place, no more, than to be a guitar shredder. And just when you think the track is finished, it's time to hold tight to your chair: a 60s beat kicks in with a detuned and hallucinated guitar solo that acts both as comping and background for Michael's sax, which weaves quietly like an alligator in the Florida Glades on a scorching July day. The rhythm is reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Hey tonight...) for a disoriented piece that gets stuck in your brain. Sublime Blake. Towards the end, Kummel overturns all the norms of guitar style. David Torn, Fripp, and Gilmour fused together with a rockabilly-sounding guitar, absolutely unthinkable in an orthodox jazz record. A small double bass solo as a closing cameo. Theme reprise, end. Ten minutes of pure and sound hallucination.
4) 'Cuban Sandwich' is a piece with a flavor and Middle Eastern scales that in its aftertaste resembles Night in Tunisia, without copying its melodic layout. This is no small feat. A bass clarinet builds a drone around the acoustic piano for these uncertain arrows above a solid, calypso-like rhythmic base, only to suddenly end ashore.
5) 'Feast' is the ongoing celebration on an obsessive rhythmic base, disrupted by the initial guitar arpeggios. The theme is exposed and then proceeds with dreamy and 'displaced' solos from both sax and guitar: have you ever heard a slide guitar plucked multiple times per second with autowah and phaser? Like lysergic acid in your temples. Recommended to listen at 400 watts RMS per channel at full blast.
6) 'Languidity' is an evident nod to the most orthodox tradition and to the golden era Charlie Mingus: the same compositional breath, same tempo and progression for a beautiful piece that is fully within the traditional jazz measure. Michael Blake bares his soul completely and offers it to you entirely. There are no secrets. Dialogue among musicians with their instruments at hand. Just as Mingus used to do with Charlie Parker: two fine intellectuals, despite what some claim to be true about Parker (read the beautiful biography by Gianfranco Salvatore, recently republished in an updated version). "Let's continue the conversation with instruments." Exactly. It's no coincidence that next comes
7) 'Meditation For A Pair Of Wirecutters' by Mingus. A very traditional piece of 'disruptive jazz' (appropriate oxymoron here, according to this humble writer!) from the sixties, with a Blake in top form supported by the rhythm section of the damned Danes, worth a couple of lines. Michael lives in New York and has his collaborations. Sometimes, however, when he wants to break and create something truly different, he tours in Europe to meet and play with them, or he has them come to the USA: Kresten Osgood, a magnetically animalistic drummer with powerful and lethal drumming; Soren Kjaergaard, Kresten's cousin and a very mature and versatile pianist despite his youth; Jonas Wastergaard, the double bassist always in cahoots with the other two. For Michael, these guys have a catalytic and disorienting effect: he usually brings the themes and communicates his intentions to them; they nod diligently and then while playing, actually take him somewhere else. Just as should happen in jazz. With creative collective breathing and unpredictable results.
8) 'A Hole Is To Dig' shows us the most serene side of this collaboration. 'Peace' is perhaps the most suitable term for this positive track, lethal for your soul. Marvelous interplay and atmosphere.
9) 'Neil's Toy Train' is the most fitting closure to the album. It is, in fact, a sort of delicate theme, this one also almost timeless, giving you the sensation of an abandonment dance.
One of the best albums of the last decade. My humble opinion. Highly recommended for those who expect more and better from jazz.
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