Spring Heel Jack

Masses

Genre: JAZZ / FUSION

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

First vinyl pressing of a sublime jazz improv session from the depths of London’s mutant millennium jazz scene, starring Evan Parker and William Parker throwing down with Spring Heel Jack’s Ashley Wales & John Coxon, recorded in NYC, 1999.

Reloaded from its Abbey Road masters for Thirsty Ear on Spring Heel Jack’s label, Treader, ‘Masses’ represents a fierce attempt to reconcile jazz’s many languages and thrust them into a new century, following the concept of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series Continuum with a rotating cast of members based around the core duo of Matthew Shipp (Piano) and William Parker (Bass).. Recorded just weeks into the C.21st, Ashley Wales & John Coxon summon some of the late C.20th’s greatest free improv jazz players in a break away from the preceding decade’s more tepid jazz strains toward a new wilderness clearly informed by tradition but wilfully bending and diffusing it into fresh shapes along downtempo, modal, and electroacoustic axes, said to “create its own time and space” by its pianist Matthew Shipp.

The 12-part ensemble swarm between harmonised consonance and atonality from the off with the noirish fever dream of smudged keys and double bass subtly gnawed by distortion on ‘Chorale’, establishing parameters which they twist up into the low-slung swagger of ‘Chiaroscuro’, scorched by wigged-out sax, and headlong into the thrilling calamity of the title piece. ‘Salt’ turns on the cosmic afterburners for a tumultuous Sun Ra-like effect led by Evan Parker’s sax squall, and ‘Red Worm’ incurs on jazz doom terrain like Bohren Und der Club of Gore after too much whiskey, before resolving in the space between spiritual jazz and noise on the heart-in-mouth swell of a ‘Coda’ that feels like a rawer interstice between Alice Coltrane and her acolytes in California’s contemporary new age jazz nexus.

LP (Black Vinyl) (10)