Iain Ballamy/Food Organic and GM Food (Feral Records) **** £13.99
In the suspicious days before pick-and-mix culture, when the worlds of experimental classical music and sharp-end jazz were much further apart, the gag used to be that the classical avant garde would call their music something like Pythagorean Discourses and the jazzers would call theirs Jammin' at Eddie's.
Iain Ballamy, the English saxophonist, comes somewhere between the two with the title of his latest album of Scandinavian collaborations. But it isn't (unless very tangentially) a musical homily on the relative values of contemporary gastronomy.
Food is the name of Ballamy's adventurous quartet with three Norwegian partners, the group that toured the UK last year. The organic/GM connection refers to the mixture of unadorned acoustic playing and live electronics they explore. This is Food's second album - the first was recorded live at the Molde Jazz Festival in July 1998 after the adventurous Ballamy had worked on a project there with a Norwegian improvising trio, and discovered a chemistry of free-associative music, traditional lyricism and harmonic subtlety he hadn't realised was possible.
The music here is from last year's tour. As with the first Food disc it veers in mood between spacey reflectiveness, attractively ragged trumpet/sax ensemble sections rather reminiscent of the Ayler brothers, and headlong percussion-driven improvisation. The variety of textures and moods is wider than on the first Food album, and the elements have been assembled with a composer's sense of balance and narrative shape.
Ballamy's own saxophone sound, an eloquent combination of the fragile and the muscular, opens the music with a warm, Celtically inflected solo melody. A graceful, folksy theme gives way to thudding electronics, with Arve Henriksen's ghostly trumpet shimmering over it. Later, a hiccupping trip-hop and a swelling and fading of voices eventually spreads into the space. A sound reminiscent of the Miles Davis/Wayne Shorter interplay of In a Silent Way is close at hand too.
Ballamy's and Food's considerable achievement is to establish an immense variety of fresh contemporary backdrops for what's often still relatively orthodox and evocatively lyrical solo-jazz improvising. A little more of the trumpet/saxophone interplay would have given it marginally more breadth, but much of this disc is a repository of beautiful and unexpected sounds.
