Glaswegian drummer and composer Corrie Dick has made a debut album worthy of the word that’s been out about him since the Chaos Collective of young UK originals (which also introduced Laura Jurd and Elliot Galvin) came to notice a couple of years ago. Impossible Things (the title is Lewis Carroll’s) is a bold fusion of Celtic folk music, African percussion subtlety, and muscular postbop. Vocalist Alice Zawadzki’s meticuously nuanced delivery keeps her intimate poem Soar on the compelling side of sentimentality, and her care with soft sounds contrasts strikingly with the sax dirge and lurching drumming that introduces Six Impossible Things. The fiddle-and-whistle Celtic dance of King William Walk invites trumpeter Jurd and tenor saxist George Crowley into trading inventive improv, Annamarrakech is a folk theme over drum grooves drawn from Dick’s studies of Moroccan music, and Lock Your Heart Up unfolds on Zawadzki’s fragile vocal and swells to a churning soprano-sax improv from Joe Wright, one of the big crescendos of an imaginatively eclectic set.
