THE Rising Star winner at this year’s BBC Jazz Awards was the drummer Seb Rochford, whose band Polar Bear has produced a playful, inventive and imaginative album in Dimly Lit (Babel). The quartet features a front line of Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart (once of Loose Tubes fame) on saxes who interweave their lines like coiling snakes.
The band tackles everything: from the headlong charge of Polar Bear Standing and Ready to the slow-burning crescendo of Not Here, Not Near and the easy groove and bowed bass of Eve’s Apple. Themes are memorable, arrangements inventive, but the low-fi acoustic disappoints and muffles the drum sound.
The pianist Richard Fairhurst won Best New Work for the material on Standing Tall album (also Babel). The Keith Jarrett- like rhapsody of the opener, Empty Corridors, is deceptive. For most of the set he plays the Fender Rhodes. His knotty lines summon echoes of Soft Machine and Matching Mole and on the giddy whirl of Dense Fur we’re close to the Neil Ardley classic Kaleidoscope of Rainbows. But Fairhurst is his own man, leading a strong sextet (the bass clarinettist James Allsopp is outstanding).
It’s perhaps depressing that both men are working on a small independent label: who’s to blame? A cloth-eared record industry? A cloth-eared public? MTV? Take your pick. But no such problems for Nils Petter Molvaer. The Nordic trumpeter sold 150,000 copies of his solo debut Khmer in 1997 and his post-Miles Davis mix of thunderous beats and fragile trumpet has beguiled the club crowd since.
My first reaction to his live album Streamer (Sula) was that this was just more of the same: dub bass, DJs, vocal samples and Molvaer’s bittersweet horn. Rhythmically little of interest happens as your woofers shudder, and perhaps it is time for him to move on. Yet Hurry Slowly and Solid Ether still have a mesmeric force abetted by the marvellous guitarist Eivind Aarset, who sounds like Hank Marvin on acid.
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For anyone with a yen for a polyrhythm, Molvaer’s high-volume confections may seem crude but they are frequently effective.