With last year’s Flint, Snarky Puppy’s British keyboardist Bill Laurance revealed his parallel life as an imaginative TV and film composer, and used the band’s powerful rhythm team of bassist Michael League and drummer Robert “Sput” Searight to reinforce the point. Swift resumes where Flint off, with Laurance further broadening his soundworld of blended classical music, jazz, funk grooves and improv. Vocoder speech-bends nudge through orchestral swirls and heart-thudding drums, while whimsical piano vamps and soft bass figures become gliding dances pushed by choppy cello riffs. The title track has a hard-rocking undertow that drives a cooing wordless vocal and then a dubstep groove, and the dramatic U-Bahn showcases Laurance’s powerful writing for cello. A percussion showcase for Searight on The Rush, north-Africanised world-music on Red Sand, and imaginative use of electronica on Mr Elevator testify to the formidable Laurance’s rapid evolution, even if it’s toward a musical world in which most forms of jazz-rooted improv have to be content with a textural role.
