Simon Nabatov / Mark Helias / Tom Rainey: Assemblage

Avant Jazz / Free Improvisation / Free Jazz
premiera polska: 2025-07-01
opakowanie: Gatefoldowe etui
opis:
Editor's Info
Simon Nabatov’s supercharged trio featuring the world-beating rhythm section of bassist Mark Helias and drummer Tom Rainey pops like a boogie of weasels throughout this gloriously inventive collection fuelled on a frenetic directness which betrays its New York provenance.
An incisive collage of approaches, unified by a prolix-detonating concision that chomps straight for the jugular, Assemblage swings from jazz-indebted carnivals of sustained eight-note pulse, with ‘Upstream’ and ‘Take a Breather’ huffed-up on five boroughs brio, bursting with lung-busting chicanery and express-paced verve, to the more strident compositional strategies of ‘Uncoil’ and ‘Hammered’, two intricately-structured, gristle-trimmed mood pieces which erupt in combustible technicolour like a Jackson Pollock sucker-punch risked on the turn of a dime.
Zigging between cantering improvisation and subtle communion, the dozen pieces on Assemblage evolve in an intricate, though never showy, analogue to Jean Dubuffet’s sublime butterfly-winged mosaics, which at their surface scintillate with a chaotic bricolage of disparate components, but upon closer scrutiny reveal an ornate patchwork of molecular power, piebald with elemental beauty. Zoom out. Get another view. What first emerged as a puckish, playful bedlam becomes a gilded labyrinth that’s ripe for endless (re)discovery, an oneiric amalgam forged through flair, finesse and erudition.
Whether on this album’s four engrossing onomatopoeic abstracts – seething in glitchy prickles of Nabatov’s live iPad-derived electronics and sporting titles like Snow White’s lesser-known sidekicks (with ‘Plucky’, ‘Frisky’ and ‘Stretchy’ all taking their place alongside the more regular ‘Grumpy’) – or while reverently stoking the flickering embers of Bill Evan’s ‘quiet fire’ during the delicious meditations of ‘Daily Sorrows’, Assemblage encourages a radical change in our focus, a multi-layered and complex deep-listening approach better suited to garner its manifold delights.
by Spencer Grady

muzycy:
Simon Nabatov - piano, live electronics
Mark Helias - bass
Tom Rainey - drums

utwory:
1. Upstream 4:08
2. Cagey 5:28
3. Flat Whites 2:53
4. Plucky 2:45
5. Daily Sorrows 4:23
6. Take A Breather 4:49
7. Uncoil 5:40
8. Frisky 2:46
9. Naive Visitor 4:44
10. Grumpy 2:00
11. Hammered 5:47
12. Stretchy 3:24

total time - 49:14
wydano: February 4, 2025
nagrano: Recorded May 21 2024 at the Samurai Hotel Studio, Astoria NY