The London-based American bass virtuoso, bandleader and teacher Michael Janisch is currently touring the music from this double album, on which the warmly exclamatory sound of a classic hard-bop lineup (trumpet, sax, keys, bass and drums) is updated with edgy, post-millennium melodic and rhythmic devices, and the 2011 live recording at its core is tweaked by state-of-the-art studio effects. Overdubbed electric basses and didgeridoos merge and spin in echoing space; and contemporary Latin grooves carry bright, tightly wound themes like 1960s Blue Note sessions stretched into Steve Coleman-esque melody-mazes. Pianist Leo Genovese’s smouldering Chacaraca emerges amid free-jazz horn swerves and smears; while trumpeter Jason Palmer’s Crash mixes catlike prowlings with glimpses and retreats of a bop-band horn chorus, and then develops into rolling free-swing. The intense agenda of personal and social concerns that drives this project may account for a reluctance to whittle it down to its essences a little more, but it’s muscular and sometimes unexpectedly tender contemporary jazz.
