DeJohnette, Grenadier, Medeski, Scofield
Hudson
(Motéma)
★★★★☆
Arve Henriksen
Towards Language
(Rune Grammofon)
★★★★☆
On Hudson, a relaxed, rootsy album recorded in upstate New York, you’ll hear jazz and you’ll hear rock. What you won’t hear is jazz-rock. Instead of the mix of hyperactive soloing and thumping backbeats popularised in the 1970s, here are four musicians who have grown up listening to rock applying jazz thinking in more subtle ways.
The guitarist John Scofield, the keyboardist John Medeski, the bassist Larry Grenadier and Jack DeJohnette on drums may just be the ultimate jam band. Their reading of the Band’s Up on Cripple Creek retains its rootsy charm; Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay stretches out over a slippery Caribbean groove. More radically, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall is only briefly glimpsed before Scofield slips his moorings and leads the band off into the unknown.
There’s more conventionally jazz material — the guitar and organ groove of Tony then Jack and El Swing, propelled by walking bass. Both are Scofield tunes. The opening (and unrepresentative) trance-jam title track recalls early 1970s Miles Davis.
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This all amounts to a warm, inviting album by musicians wearing their virtuosity lightly as they try genres and styles for size — jazz Americana, if you will. Hudson is also recommended for rock fans who normally scarper at the mention of jazz.
Perhaps it’s time someone invented a term — Nordicana perhaps — for the spare, minimalist and bleakly beautiful music that, since Jan Garbarek, has regularly emerged from Scandinavia. The Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen is a prime exponent, his moody lyricism summoning images of frozen fjords and tundra in the twilight, whether he intends to or not.
Here he veers between soundscapes, glacial trip-hop and tone poems in the company of the electronics guru Jan Bang and the plangent guitar of Eivind Aarset. This sort of ambient atmospherics was once considered left-field, late-night Radio 3 fare. However, with wider audiences exposed to the electronic soundtracks of The Killing and now Broadchurch, the currents of musical fashion may be turning towards Henriksen and his exquisite gloom.