Jan 30 2020
Best of 2019 #19: Adam Baldych Quartet – “Sacrum Profanum”
Adam Baldych, as with many musicians before him, came up through the classical music traditions, and, like many musicians before him, gravitated to jazz’s untamed wildness and structural freedoms. But you don’t forget where you’ve come from, and the act of revisiting the past is as natural as breathing. The challenge is in how to interpret the past, now, viewed through older perspectives and in the light of today. And so, on his latest, the violinist keeps one foot in his past traditions and the other in his current, and it’s why austere classical pieces display some of the audacious dramatics of a typical Baldych jazz work, but also, conversely, why the jazz pieces reflect a more focused, sleeker lyricism than what one might otherwise expect from the violinist. This shadowplay between past and present results in Baldych’s best work to date.
Your album personnel: Adam Bałdych (violin, renaissance violin), Krzysztof Dys (piano, prepared upright piano, toy piano), Michał Barański (double bass), and Dawid Fortuna (drums, crotales, gran cassa).
Released on ACT Music.
Music from Warsaw, Poland.
Sometimes putting words to things drains them of their magic. Laboriously describing every detail of a kaleidoscopic display will never impart the beauty of its unfolding and rejoin. A vivid dream of whole new mythological lands is likely to lose some of its majesty when the dream is scribbled down upon waking. The dwindling glow of a sunset on gently rippled waves is only useful as a written device if the imagination of the person reading the words amplifies it sufficiently. 
No album in 2019 displayed the immense power of a simple melody more than the 
In a modern jazz world where the forms of expression have become more varied and strange and untethered from the original sounds that marked the first giant steps of jazz, it’s a welcome experience to encounter a recording to remind us what got us all crazy about this music in the first place. Gerald Cleaver’s live performance recording at Firehouse 12 with his Violet Hour ensemble swings like mad as it charges straight ahead. The solos make you wish they’d never end except when the sextet comes back together and makes you wish for them to never part ways again. The production is such that it brings the electricity of the live environment right into your home without any drop-off, and, yet, also leave you a bit jealous of those who were there to hear it in person. This is Jazz today, this is Jazz as it ever was.
Jan 31 2020
Best of 2019 #18: Laughing Bastards – “Unanimal”
Your album personnel: Michel Mast (tenor sax), Jan-Sebastiaan Degeyter (guitar), Anneleen Boehme (double bass), Marcos della Rocha (drums), and Eline Duerinck (cello).
The album is Self-Produced, and released as Ham Records.
Music from Ghent, Belgium.
Listen | Read more | Available at: Amazon
Like this:
By davesumner • Recap: Best of 2019 • 3 • Tags: Best Jazz of 2019, Cello, Ghent (Belgium), Laughing Bastards, Self-Produced