Petter Eldh - Presents Koma Saxo
The Free Jazz Collective 80
By Martin Schray
Up to now Petter Eldh has mainly been known as a sideman in projects like Christian Lillinger’s Open Form For Society and Gard Nilssen’s Acoustic Unity or he has played as one among equals in ensembles like Amok Amor and Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (just to name a few). Koma Saxo, however, is his own project. It showcases a musician who displays a pronounced sense of style, a focused composer and band leader obsessed with a true sense for hook-lines and crazy rhythms. But when the band throws the rhythmic and harmonic framework to the wind, you can feel their energy in your bones. Rooted in postmodern hipster jazz, in the music of the New York downtown scene (e.g. the first Lounge Lizards album), and Berlin’s current musical multiculturalism Koma Saxo is pure fun. The music of the band oscillates between virtuoso art punk, acoustic drum'n'bass, funk, free improvisation and new music. And yet it’s always clearly a jazz album.
“Koma Tema“ echoes 1990s drum’n’bass, “Slakten Makten Takten“ quotes hiphop, “Kali Koma“ has a pure funk riff at its core. On “Ostron Koma“ the three horns create a theme reminiscent of the fusion albums of the 1970s (say Mahavishnu Orchestra or Billy Cobham), which Eldh foils in the lower registers while the drums manage to find a whole universe in between. Consequently the band covers a piece of that era, Matti Oiling’s “Cyclops Dance“. However, they convert the pinball monotony of the original into an organic free bop stomper. The track is a perfect example of the fact that the heat of Koma Saxo’s music doesn’t come from mechanical loops, but from the possibility to do whatever they want whenever they like: groove and improv flow into each other, sometimes a brusque gap separates them.
At the eye of the storm Eldh’s hard, crushing bass always provides orientation. The fact that this music blazes so brightly is mainly the merit of excellent musicians. Otis Sandsjö paints textures and spreads overtones with his circular breathing on the tenor saxophone. He’s augmented by Jonas Kulhammar and Mikki Innanen, both also on saxophones. With Christian Lillinger, Eldh has today’s most exciting German musician on drums, even if calling him a “hand grenade with the safety off" in an interview might be a bit misleading. Lillinger is rather interested in clear lines and sounds, whereby he always puts himself at the service of the whole. After his many projects of the last year in which he was the leader, he said that he simply enjoys “just“ being a sideman. Apart from that, Lillinger often plays his drums with stopped sounds, fast, light as a feather, hectic, but always with a nervous swing to it.
Finally, Koma Saxo attach great importance to a transparent production, the way it is in hiphop. Eldh cut live recordings of the band from Helsinki into pieces, linked drum sounds to studio effects, and went back into the studio with the band. The pulse seeks the edge, the urban coolness remains perceptible in a structured chaos. Awesome album!
Koma Saxo is available on LP (in a red and a black vinyl edition), as a CD and a download.
Koma Saxo by Petter Eldh Thu Jan 30 05:01:00 GMT 2020
The Free Jazz Collective 80
By Eyal Hareuveni
Swedish, Berlin-based double bass player-composer-producer Petter Eldh, known from the trio of British pianist Django Bates and Norwegian drummer Gard Nilssen’s Acoustic Unity, has an original vision how futurist, free jazz can and should sound. His potent, new working quintet Koma Saxo – featuring fellow-Swedish tenor sax players Otis Sandsjö (witb whom Eldh collaborated recently in the recording of vocalist Lucia Cadotsh’s Speak Low Renditions, Yellowbird, 2017), Jonas Kullhammar, Finnish alto, baritone sax player Mikko Innanen, and German drummer and long-term comrade Christian Lillinger (Eldh played in the drummer’s Open Form for Society, Plaist, 2019, and both recorded with the Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler the album Punkt Vrt. Plastik, Intakt, 2018) – was recorded live during the quintet's debut performance in December 2018 at We Jazz Festival in Helsinki and a day later at Finnvox Studios, Helsinki. In the post-production phase, Eldh edited and mixed the raw live and studio material with additional recordings of himself in at the Galatea Studios, Berlin into a jam packed 36 minutes.
Koma Saxo has indeed a unique, surprising sound of its own, far from the purist-acoustic versions of free jazz ensembles. We Jazz describes this sound as “a tightly-knitted posse of jazz assassins on the run. At times, the pieces fall gloriously apart, just enough in order to be ripe to put back together again.” Another valid description: imagine two restless groups, each with five charismatic leaders but with a very limited attention span, keep colliding with each other, but with a distinct, subversive sense of driving swing. O.K. Maybe, swing on steroids.
This kind of sonic vision could lead to a total chaos or manic freak-out. But the musical imagination of all the five musicians, their fine conceptions of free music, risk-taking and anarchistic humor, as well as their deep knowledge of the legacy of free jazz, and especially the Nordic one, and the inventive production skills of Eldh guarantee a joyful and invigorating listening experience. Eldh and Lillinger form a powerful and sharp rhythm section who move the music with elegant, authoritative fluidity. The front line of the sax player charges the aggressive rhythmic pulse with delicious melodic ideas and and emphatic, cleverly layered interplay.
Koma Saxo bursts with the brief, schizophrenia of “Kali Koma” that sounds as a compact version of post-bop hip-hop. "Ostron Koma" injects some fast, soulful blows to the dense formula. But the real revelation are the inspired adaptations of seventies classic pieces by legendary Finnish drummer -“Cyclope Dance” by Matti Oiling and the majestic “Byågz” by Edward Vesala. The driving force of Eldh is captured best on “Koma Tema” and spices “Koma Sport” with Middle-Eastern” themes. Lillinger contributes his challenging compositional ideas to “Blumer” while Kullhammar enjoys experiencing the hyper-swing on his “Fanfarum For Komarum II” and Innanen insists on exploring unison, melodic lines by the saxists frontine on his “LH 440”. This album ends with exceptional, moving cover of Swedish composer-songwriter Olle Adolphson “Så Rinner Tiden Bor” (The Time is Running in Swedish).
Listen to the future. It sounds promising.
Thu Jan 30 05:00:00 GMT 2020