Gwen Ansell
TANANAS WIDE ENSEMBLE: Unamunacua (Gallo/GMP)
FOR this, their fifth album, Tananas’s core of guitarist Steve Newman and drummer Ian Herman expands to include more than a dozen jazz and folk colleagues. The difference is dramatic. The spacey, wistful guitar tunes are still there (with reprises of a few old favourites) but the limited texture of their previous small-group sound has been replaced by a sensorium of rough and smooth. Folk players like Noise Khanyile, Pops Mohammed and Pedro Espi Sanchez bring the non- standard tuning of traditional instruments to the mix. Reedman Robbie Jansen – who has never played a predictable note in his life – subverts the pretty themes with magnificently “out” playing: he’s never sounded better. The jungle-flavoured Seven with its breakneck-tempo programmed rhythm, takes South African roots into the sound lab and on to the dance floor like never before. Only Vusi Mahlasela’s beautifully-sung ballad Margaret feels incongruous; it belongs on another, different album. This is world-class music, firmly rooted in South Africa, with no trace of ethno-cutesiness – quite probably the indigenous jazz release of the year.
ORNETTE COLEMAN: Sound Museum/Three Women (Verve/Harmolodics)
ONE half of a two-CD pair is all that has reached these shores so far. Each album contains the same material in different versions, designed to demonstrate the freedom that Coleman’s harmolodics formula creates for musicians. Coleman on sax, violin and trumpet, Geri Allen on keyboards, Charnett Moffett on bass and Denardo Coleman on drums produce a sound reminiscent of the Tomorrowis the Question album; the compositions are appealing, spiky, boppish. Although this is a less immediately accessible album than last year’s Tone Dialling, there are magnificent performances from the rhythm players. In particular, Denardo and Moffett strike sparks off one another you can almost feel. And Ornette remains his magisterial, original self. Texture and imagination rule here: music to set the mind free.
CYRUS CHESTNUT: Earth Stories (Atlantic)
CHESTNUT is one of the Young Lion generation of piano players: a Marsalis alumnus and sometime accompanist of Betty Carter. On this, his second album as leader, he plays a dozen originals, and one standard, mostly just piano plus rhythm, but including one piece arranged for horns and brass featuring Antonio Hart. And on this evidence, Chestnut is emerging as someone who doesn’t only (like his age-mates) play superbly, but who can also write. From the first notes of Decisions, Decisions, these are tunes you can go away humming; standards in the making. And the musicianship is a delight – especially Chestnut’s warm, witty, Waller- ish left hand. The traditional jazz album format clearly still has a lot to offer – when the mind behind the music is fine enough.
NORMAN BROWN: Better Days Ahead (Polygram)
ELEVEN songs along standard boogie/seduce lines from a very talented guitarist in the George Benson mould. (He even, says the promo handout in breathlessly amazed tones, “scats over the guitar part”.) Brown plays like a dream, but to judge from this album he doesn’t have too many ideas. No doubt, with the Christmas party season approaching, this will sell. So will tinsel, custard and fruit-flavoured wines. ‘Nuff said.