By John Shand and Annabel Ross
Jeremy Rose’s Project Infinity exploits the wondrous acoustics at the Sydney performance space.
Jeremy Rose, Project Infinity: Live at Phoenix Central Park
★★★★½
Listen closely, and you can hear the sound of the room where this music was made. Even through the thickets of electronics and expert post-production, you can still sense the space that made the different sounds sing as one: Chippendale’s Phoenix Central Park, a venue with an interior akin to an ant’s nest and acoustics close to heaven.
One could say that composer and saxophonist Jeremy Rose wears many hats, given his array of projects, including the groovy Vampires and the cross-cultural Vazesh. But really it’s the same hat covering a questing mind that enjoys placing his improvisatory skills in wildly different contexts. One could also say that Project Infinity, being a free-improvising quartet, doesn’t really lean on his composing flair, except that this would miss the extemporaneous composing that’s happening at every moment in free improvisation as the performers’ ears and intuitions lend shape to spontaneity.
Rose is joined by Novak Manojlovic (piano, keyboard), Tully Ryan (drums) and Ben Carey (modular synthesiser), players with imaginations to match his own, who instantly intuit when to place their instruments in the music’s foreground and when to pull them back to a supportive role.
Listen to them do this on the spooky A Shape of Thought, which sounds like music that nervous ghosts might make. In fact, edginess is something of an album through line, with Ryan overlaying grooves that are as jittery as they are compelling. Even when the drums fade to rubato washes in Excess of Access, you still feel the tension of when they’ll reassert themselves, and meanwhile are enthralled by Rose’s bass clarinet mourning over an otherworldly soundscape.
Despite having titles, the pieces are really all part of an extended improvisation incorporating such organic changes of mood as to allow Rose to christen them separately. Symptoms of Our Age has his soprano crying over a dystopian maze of piano, drums and electronics. Perturbation begins with a heartbeat that’s suffering severe arrhythmia, but it is when this settles that the music becomes really scary, with Rose’s soprano squealing in an asylum of sounds that only the brave should listen to in the dark, culminating in Manojlovic’s breaking-glass piano.
With his Earshift label, composer and saxophonist Jeremy Rose continues to release a diverse cross-section of Australian jazz.Credit: Sheshanka Samarajiwa
Iterative Semiotics is about as close to reassuring as the music gets, which means it’s still disquieting, although with a sense of humour now lightly tugging at its edges. You need this respite because Heuristics would cast you adrift in a gravity-free zone once more, were the intensity of the four-way dialogue not riveting you to the spot. Finally, Memory and Sex ends the trance, and sends you back out into the world reprogrammed – in a good way.
Simultaneously with this album, Rose’s Earshift label has released three others offering a wondrously diverse cross-section of Oz jazz artistry. There’s rambunctiousness from Phillip Johnston and the Greasy Chicken Orchestra, reimagined Bach from luminous singer Michelle Nicolle, and beauty blended with visceral excitement from Underwards.
- John Shand
Rita Ora’s You & I is inspired by her marriage to filmmaker Taika Waititi.
Rita Ora, You & I
★★★
Say what you like about Rita Ora, but you can’t fault her work ethic. You & I is only her third album in 11 years, a modest output by pop machine standards, but in the meantime her commitments have included TV hosting stints on shows such as The Voice, The X-Factor and The Masked Singer in the UK, and most recently on The Voice Australia.
These gigs are testament to her likeability — she comes over as refreshingly unpretentious and down-to-earth, in spite of her increasingly glamorous existence, especially since becoming part of a power couple with her now-husband, Kiwi film director Taika Waititi. You & I, her “most diaristic album yet”, is allegedly centred on their relationship, but it’s equally concerned with that age-old pop trope: self-love.
Working with a range of top producers, Ora has assembled a glossy package of radio-ready tracks, but for the most part they feel generic in style and content, more universal than confessional. The first singles, and most likely hits, are stacked up top and loaded with EDM-lite beats and hackneyed lyrics. Don’t Think Twice sounds like a hundred other pop songs that open with orchestral arrangements before building to a huge chorus.
The chugging synths on You Only Love Me are similarly familiar, while Ora’s singing is strong and malleable, almost to a fault. She’s so good at adapting her voice to suit all manner of styles and genres, in the end there’s little to distinguish it as hers.
Praising You, her reboot of Fatboy Slim’s 1998 dance hit Praise You, is not the disaster I feared it might be. It’s cleverly done, wedging the pop-ified chorus between original verses and adapting the lyrics to describe her and Waititi’s relationship (they haven’t come a “long, long way together” just yet but “you feel like a religion”, she sings).
That Girl, meanwhile, is a reimagining of the 1985 Eddie Murphy track Party All The Time, and similarly gets new verses hitched to a barely altered chorus. But it’s less imaginative than Praising You, and feels lazy as a result.
The titular track is one of four slowies on the album, a power ballad ripped straight from the ’80s and stuffed with twee pop culture-referencing lines, but Ora sings with conviction, achieving an impressive Tina Turner-esque croak in its most impassioned moments. (Later, on Shape Of Me, a love letter of sorts to her mother, she affects a twang that could be mistaken for Welsh singer Duffy.)
For the next two tracks, Ora turns her love inwards, and while it’s an outwardly believable sentiment — she certainly seems to be in a great place personally and professionally — there’s nothing specific enough to lodge the song in the memory, just some predictable schtick about sticks and stones. Girl In The Mirror continues in the same vein, with a surprising key change at the chorus that is satisfying, but again oddly familiar, as though lifted from another track with only a minor tweak.
Rita Ora: loved up and likeable, but still playing catch-up to pop’s reigning divas.
Notting Hill is the album’s iPhone-torches-in-the-air moment, with Ora reflecting nostalgically on teenage hijinks in west London over piano and gentle handclaps, while closer I Don’t Wanna Be Your Friend maintains that wistful register. The track is pleasant enough, but a tale of bottled up desire seems a strange place to conclude what is ostensibly a celebration of her happy marriage.
Ora’s current star power in Australia means you’ll likely hear these serviceable songs in gyms and hair salons everywhere in coming months. But nothing feels distinctive or vital enough to nudge her closer to Adele or Dua Lipa status.
- Annabel Ross
Trio Tapestry: Exposing their very souls on Our Daily Bread.Credit: ECM
Trio Tapestry, Our Daily Bread
★★★★½
A piano keyboard is laid out as formally as a Government House dining table. It’s up to the pianist to mess up the placement of cutlery and glassware, spill some wine and knock over a candle or two.
For decades, improviser Marilyn Crispell has displayed an exceptional grasp of how to take this most concrete of musical instruments and make it more abstract. The start and end points of her lines disguise the music’s pulse, just as her melodies disguise the prevailing harmonies. Yet the aesthetics in which she deals are those of dreamy impressionism rather than unruly aural confrontation, and when not impressionistic, her artistry can conjure up the bright, semi-figurative squiggles of Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miro, but with smudged backgrounds and even more enigma.
This third exquisitely recorded offering from Trio Tapestry – led by saxophonist/composer Joe Lovano, with Crispell and drummer/percussionist Carmen Castaldi – exudes otherworldliness from the outset. It conveys something of the same deep mystery that the late drummer Paul Motian’s trio with Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell imparted: a sense of the meaning not just being carried in the notes, but in the shadows between them, so more than just the players’ emotions are being exposed. Perhaps their very souls.
Lovano is at his peak here. There’s no trace of the opaqueness or virtuosic glibness that could occasionally dilute his never-in-doubt mastery or creativity. Listen to his keening entry on tarogato (a Hungarian reed instrument) on Grace Notes, which, in its immediacy and intensity, carries echoes of John Surman’s most searing work on soprano saxophone. This is playing to expunge all extraneous thoughts and engender total immersion, with every nuance of timbre and dynamics thickening the impact and reinforcing the truth.
Carmen Castaldi, Marilyn Crispell and Joe Lovano are Trio Tapestry.Credit: Bart Babinski
An appealing languidness has often defined Lovano’s gentler tenor saxophone playing, which, at its best – as here in a duet with Crispell called Le Petit Opportun – is shrouded in ambiguities to match the pianist’s own playing. By contrast the title track has a more epic feel, without a hint of being over-baked. The piano and drums – with Castaldi swapping from mallets to brushes to sticks – create waves of sound, over which Lovano’s tenor is at its most majestic.
The saxophonist was used to working without a bass in Motian’s band, and the bass-less format suits Crispell, too, freeing her harmonically, while increasing the open space that lets the oneiric lines she sculpts appear in sharper relief. Castaldi is certainly not one to clutter that space, dancing lightly around the other instruments as he simultaneously deepens the shadows and lifts the buoyancy.
Lovano has dedicated the album to the great bassist Charlie Haden, with One for Charlie being a solo tenor piece that’s almost prayer-like in its reverence. This serves as a prelude for The Power of Three, on which Castaldi shows how little is required to make truly profound music, a feat he repeats on the tenor/drums duet Rhythm Spirit, gradually building the album’s most robust groove from the merest smattering of notes. Yet it’s a groove that somehow remains innocent rather than knowing, Castaldi having reached the high plateau that Motian first ascended, where all the decades of acquiring facility are forsaken in favour of a return to a childlike delight in simplicity.
Crispell re-joins them for Crystal Ball, one of several pieces that are so aligned with the strengths of expression of each member that they sound like three-way spontaneous compositions. This is an album to be treasured.
- John Shand
To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.
The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.