Soft Machine - Other Doors (2023)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Jun 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

It's been said that Soft Machine were the most important of the various bands who emerged from the Canterbury scene, but I've not heard enough by them to judge. I know that I've struggled with Gong, whose driving force, Daevid Allen, was a founder member of Soft Machine, but nothing I've heard thus far was quite so experimental. However, they've not done a heck of a lot lately, a string of eleven albums between 1968 and 1981 followed by only one until now, 2018's Hidden Details.

Therefore I was keen to take a listen to this, featuring a few long term members, one for the final time. Drummer John Marshall, who had four separate stints with the band, including the majority of the seventies and the entire period since their reformation in 2015, passed away in 2023, so this is his last contribution to their discography. John Etheridge is still with us but, even though he was in the band in the late seventies and in the eighties, his current run is his longest. Roy Babbington retired in 2020 but returns here to play bass on a couple of tracks, including a memorable showing on Penny Hitch.

That's the second track here and it's more substantial than Careless Eyes before it, that being an agreeable interplay of flutes and electric guitars. This one mixes bass, drums and keyboards, then adds a memorable saxophone that makes it feel complete. An electric guitar solo from Etheridge in the second half is too much for a while, noodling over a textured backdrop rather than merging with it, like Theo Travis's sax does. It works better at the end of the track, but it takes time to get there, as indeed it does on the following track, Other Doors.

As a result, this may play a lot better to jazz fans than rock fans, though the album as a whole fits well between the two. I was expecting prog rock but this is closer to jazz fusion. Whichever it may count as, it's also relatively accessible. Careless Eyes starts out highly accessible, as an incredibly easy song to listen to, and then it gets progressively jazzier as if it's moving up a scale. We might not realise we're listening to jazz until we get to Crooked Usage, when the drums ditch a pretense of playing rhythm and start to jam as a lead instrument and the bass goes off on runs everywhere. However, it's still not wildly out there, the album waiting until Fell to Earth to really challenge.

That's ten tracks into thirteen and it's a prowler from the outset, with rumbling guitar and bass, a teasing set of cymbals and a dangerous saxophone. That saxophone has been our friend for many tracks thus far, always courteous and helpful enough to walk old ladies across the road. It shows up late in Crooked Usage and is almost a voice of reason there, bringing the other instruments back into line. Here, it's a different beast entirely, threatening anyone within range. The piece almost ends a minute in, as if the band are ready to wrap things up with a flourish, but it continues on and only gets more frantic as it does so.

I can easily see unwary listeners liking this album immediately because it's just so nice but getting to Crooked Usage and wondering what they signed up for. More experienced prog fans would be a lot more knowledgeable but still run through the same scenario with Fell to Earth being the point at which they question. Either way, they'll probably skip back to track one and listen through again with very different ears. I take that as a good thing because it doesn't throw us in at the deep end and hope we can swim. It gives us lessons for a while and then reveals that we're over the Mariana Trench. Well, maybe not quite that deep but notably deeper than we were.

There are interesting touches outside those two tracks. Joy of a Toy is one for two reasons. One is that it starts out as if it's going to be a jazz improvisation on Heartbreak Hotel. Those are easy to recognise chords! It doesn't go there, but where it goes instead includes what seems to be a weird effect for Etheridge's guitar that sounds rather like it's being used to tune a radio. I'm not sure it works but it's certainly worth the attempt. Maybe Never features plenty of chirpy keyboards, as if this piece was travelling to the same deep space places that the android in Glass Hammer's Arise did last year.

The other note that I'd throw out is that I really enjoyed the bass on this album. Jazz is a genre in which every instrument can play lead and, well, is rather expected to. What's interesting is that I'd call out both bassists: long term member Babbington as a guest on Penny Hitch and especially on Now! is the Time, where the interaction between guitar and bass the entire purpose for this piece, but also Freddy Baker, his replacement, especially on The Stars Apart.

And so this doesn't start out like it's going to be an interesting album, with the easy listening that comprises Careless Eyes, but it does get there and it stays there, all the way to the final track that may well be the best on the album. That's Back in Season and it's also the longest of them at seven minutes, except for Crooked Usage at eight and a half. I think it's because because once we realise that we've moved from chilling to asking questions, we're engaged enough to want to figure out a firm answer or three. Where this fits within Soft Machine's back catalogue, I couldn't tell you, but it's much more accessible and much more interesting to me than Gong.

Edges - The End of the F***ing World (2023)

Country: Belgium
Style: Jazz Fusion
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 31 Mar 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Edges may be a debuting band, but they're a project of a Belgian guitarist, Guillaume Vierset, who has a few solo albums out, along with others with Harvest Group and LG Jazz Collective, plus guest appearances for a variety of other Belgian jazz artists. As that might suggest, this is jazz, but it's a fascinating fusion album because Vierset started playing country guitar with his father, then went to school to study classical guitar and jazz, and diversified from there. He's brought folk music into jazz and a number of songs here play with electronica, rock and even punk.

The vast majority of the album is instrumental, the only vocal piece being the closing title track, a melodious song that's the longest on offer at five minutes but also the most underwhelming, with a lounge music base and almost a subdued Iggy Pop style vocal. It's a far cry from the opener, First Round, which is probably my favourite piece here, a jaunty jazz fusion piece with some fascinating rhythms. It gets a little experimental in its second half but nowhere near to the degree that other pieces will soon relish in. It's a very good entry point to the album.

Of course, if you don't have a background in jazz fusion and you dig this opener, you may be rather confused by Better Call Pam, perhaps my other favourite track here. It starts out as electronica, a pulsing synth that sounds like it's a machine trying but not quite managing to emulate the speech of a human being. There's plenty of glitch early on, but it settles into a comfortable groove, full of movement, as if the piece is walking down the road, all chill and laid back. As it builds, it gets more and more fascinating because the process of walking appears to become more difficult, the stride veering away from what's expected and muscles starting to seize and spasm. Somehow it manages to make it to its destination without tripping over its feet, but it's a constant challenge.

While we wouldn't know this without an explanation, apparently there's a story running through a majority of this album. The first two tracks feature a man declaring the end of the fucking world, a memorable title even with censoring asterisks, because he finds himself torn between a world that is rational and structured and sane and another world "where everything is blown apart". The rest of the album is therefore a struggle between order and chaos, some pieces more structured, but a few far from it. Just as this man thinks he's figured it out on Back, it's time for a Second Round.

And, even though First Round and Better Call Pam are my favourite pieces, I'd give Second Round a place alongside them as a highlight. It starts out delicate and introspective, but gradually finds its way into chaos, the dynamic shift between beginning and end surely the most pronounced that the album gets. In its way, it's the album in microcosm but the album doesn't follow such a direct shift. It wends and weaves and shifts from the world of order to the world of chaos and back again with a playful edge.

After First Round, the most approachable song may be AC Blues, which is tender and fascinating, a lounge music piece to presage the closer but one that doesn't need a voice and whose instruments are constantly interesting. The lounge feel threatens to soothe us into slumber, but nothing being played is willing to let us, so our attention never wavers and we stay very awake and listen actively. I'm reminded here of some of what I've heard from Bill Frisell with some Mark Ribot in there for a bonus.

I don't know any of the musicians, but Vierset played all the guitars and wrote the music, leaving a trio of others behind him. Dorian Dumont may be the most prominent otherwise, as the keyboard player and pianist. Anders Christensen contributes bass and Jim Black the drums, which, in keeping with the overarching concept, often shift from rock structure to free jazz chaos. They cover a lot of ground here, all the way from the punky vibe of I Love Triads to the minimalist, near ambient intro to the title track, simply called Intro, to name just two tracks next to each other on the album.

I may know a lot more about every other genre I've covered this week than I do jazz fusion, but this is a fascinating album that's perked up my day.

Edena Gardens - Agar (2023)

Country: Denmark
Style: Space Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2023
Sites: none

Here's something fascinating that I found labelled as space rock. I'm not going to say that it isn't a space rock album, because it really kinda is, but it isn't in the way you might expect. Hawkwind this isn't. I could equally see it labelled psychedelic rock, progressive rock or even, most appropriately, cosmic jazz. There's definitely a feeling of being taken out there, way out there, but we're not in a spaceship travelling in a nice neat straight line. We're in a cosmic maelstrom, being thrown about this way and that, but in an oddly delightful way.

I see Edena Gardens described as a supergroup, which I guess they are if you confine that term to a pretty restrictive framework of musicians who record for El Paraiso Records. That's a Danish label, put together by Jonas Munk and Jakob Skøtt of the psychedelic rock band Causa Sui and this is one side project for the latter. I haven't heard Causa Sui, though this tells me that I clearly should, but I hear a lot of jazz in his performance. He's clearly wearing his jazz hat as Forst kicks off the album, but he gradually shifts into a rock mode, eventually helping channel some early King Crimson for a particularly experimental closer, Crescent Helix.

The guitarist is Nicklas Sørensen, who plays guitar for krautrock band Papir but has also released a collaborative album with Munk. I haven't heard Papir either, but I see "deceptively minimalistic" a lot when researching them and that explains his guitar approach here. That leaves Martin Rude, a multi-instrumentalist who plays in a host of projects with Skøtt including the Martin Rude & Jakob Skøtt Duo, the Rude Skøtt Osborn Trio and the London Odense Ensemble. I presume he takes care of the bass here but quite possibly other instruments too.

What they conjure up here on their second album is something truly immersive. I don't know if any of the eight songs on offer were improvised or not. I'm guessing that they weren't, but it seems to be entirely believable that they were. Either way, they conjure up soundscapes that we can simply dive into. These are less songs and more moods to wear like the water from a shower. The cover art may suggest that everything's dark and tumultuous, but it's not always the former and rarely the latter. Sombra del Mar feels like a grey day into which the sun has suddenly decided to intrude. The Veil is plodding doom, almost like a Pink Floyd instrumental recorded at 45rpm but played at 33.

As that might suggest, your favourite piece here—and I should emphasise that everything on offer is entirely instrumental—is likely to be the one that resonates with you the most. For me, while I'd call all of them fascinating, the standout is Montezuma. It's another slow one, but it's a delightful exercise in contrasts. The bass goes low and echoes like it's stuck in an underwater pit, resonating with the gentle motion of waves. However, the guitar finds some beautiful tones, as if it's surfing on a lake sprawled above that pit. Somehow we're seeing both at once because six prior tracks by Edena Gardens had somehoe opened our third eye or something.

I have no idea where the band's influences are, but I hear a lot of diverse sounds here. At one end of the spectrum, I hear drone metal bands like Sunn O))) in the bedrock of songs like The Veil, but Montezuma only hints at that, drifting further towards the primal guitarwork of Neil Young when he's been rocking out for a while but then decided to get mellow. At the band's most soothing, I'm hearing Pink Floyd, especially in the keyboards, but the guitars aren't remotely Dave Gilmour. The name I'd throw out is Bill Frisell, remembering his work with Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horvitz on the Rubáiyát compilation to commemorate 40 years of Elektra Records.

But it isn't remotely that simple. There's post-rock here, alternative rock and stoner rock. Much of it could be described as prog rock, which segues into jazz and right back again, or krautrock, which covers both at once. How else should we describe Ascender, which feels like layers of water flowing over a fascinating set of drum rolls? And it's psychedelic rock above everything else, something I'd expect would be well worth playing through a pair of good headphones in the dark. Of course, the genre doesn't matter. At the end of the day, whatever we call it, it's a gem for anyone who likes to be immersed in soundscapes.

And now I want to dive into the El Paraiso back catalogue. It feels like a door has opened in front of me and I need to walk through it to see what's lying beyond. This may well be a peach of a gateway drug.

White Ward - False Light (2022)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 17 Jun 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | VK | YouTube

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the saxophone is a highly versatile metal instrument. It was not all that long ago that that I thought that, to bring it into metal, you had to go batshit insane, like John Zorn on his Painkiller releases, but that's not true. White Ward, a post-black metal band from Ukraine, prove that yet again here because, as with dark jazz outfits like Katharos XIII, their saxophone works as a contrast and as a driving instrument of mood and menace. And, as much as I enjoy the work of the musicians playing more traditional metal instruments here, it's the sax that haunts me. Dima Dudko does a magnificent job but, crucially, the songwriting allows it too.

The sax often conjures up visuals for me, even if they're often the same ones, and that starts early on this album. Leviathan is a ballsy song to open with, given that it's thirteen minutes long, but it isn't even the longest track here and there are eight on offer. It starts out like a film score, water sound effects setting a scene as the keyboards grow a mood. It feels eighties, something that you might hear on a Michael Mann soundtrack. Then it gets heavy. And then the sax shows up, patient but dark. Whatever this story is, it's not going to end well. When the vocals arrive, they're raw and angry, but more like hardcore screams than black metal shrieks. Things develop and grow and the sax plays its part, until soon after six minutes in when everything fades away and we're back in the quiet rain with the sax stepping up in its more traditional film noir role.

Now, that's only half of track one, so you can imagine the dynamics in play throughout this album. It's not fair to suggest that White Ward alternate between black metal and soft jazz, but it's quite the idea and there's some truth in it, so it's a useful place to start. After all, if you haven't heard a group play in this sort of style, that's going to make absolutely no sense to you and you're going to try to conjure it up in your head and probably fail. Hopefully it intrigues you, though, and that will prompt you to check them out. Leviathan is far from a bad place to start.

Probably the worst place to start is the next song here, Salt Paradise, because of the approach the vocals take, which presumably have meaning within the wider story. They come across to me like a monotone Nick Cave, which is awkward because so much of what magic Cave generates comes from his magnificent intonation. There's no intonation here, deliberately so, and I wonder if this is as an effort to draw a character as sociopathic. I have no idea what this story is, but the moods suggest it revolves around violence and maybe redemption and a sociopathic character would be at home in a violent story.

Given the presence of lengthy samples, taken from speeches, TED talks or maybe documentaries, in Phoenix and the closer, Downfall, which suggests their importance, I wonder if there's a deeper level in play too. Maybe it's telling a story about individuals, the ones we hear arguing bitterly in a couple of these songs, like Silence Circles, but it's simultaneously telling a story about something far larger, like the fate of the planet. Maybe I should go read the lyrics, but I'm not sure I care that much. I adore the instrumentation on White Ward albums. This band are incredibly tight and they have a natural sense for dynamic play that very few bands can boast.

And that's my primary focus, especially as I'm not a huge fan of the vocal approach. There are two vocalists here, Yurii Kazarian and Andrii Pechatkin, who also play guitar and bass respectively. The lead—and I don't know which is which—has a shouty voice for black metal, one that wouldn't work too well singing about demons but does in a more visceral story that's grounded in dark reality, as this album surely is. The other, usually in the background, varies. As a clean voice, it's rich and cool and engaging. As a harsh voice, it's less so, because it's a shouty growl that seems half-hearted, as if it used to sing hardcore and wants to move into death but can't quite commit to that premise.

I found myself in an odd place with this album. I gave White Ward's previous relese, Love Exchange Failure an 8/10 and my instinct told me to do the same here. It's an ambitious album, one that runs for sixty-six minutes and never outstays its welcome, and it flows in a fascinating cinematic way. If I hesitate, it's because of odd clashes that most people aren't going to care about, but I find them a fascinating set of clashes because they're counterintuitive. The band seem to moving in a modern direction in some senses, with the hardcore-influenced vocals and some edgy chords at points. Yet they also seem to refuse to follow trends, many of these songs uncompromisingly non-commercial, with wild shifts from black metal to jazz and with such a prominent and varied use of saxophone.

At the end of the day, I find these clashes fascinating and part of the joy of this band. After all, this is a band doing their own thing in their own way and blazing a trail because of it. And that I dig.

Neptunian Maximalism - Éons (2020)

Country: Belgium
Style: Jazz Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 26 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Neptunian Maximalism only made two end of year lists that I'm looking at, at Pop Matters and Treble Zine, but they were high in both of them and they sounded so wild that I had to check them out (and a record label that they record for too—I, Voidhanger, named for a Darkthrone track—who release what they describe as "obscure, unique, and uncompromising visions from the metal underground.") That does fit this release, which is metal, I think, though it's jazz first and foremost.

It's a rather daunting release, a triple album of experimental music from Belgium running two hours and ten minutes and covers Bandcamp tags as wildly diverse as "dark ambient", "drone metal", "free jazz", "heavy psych", "stoner metal" and "tribal", among others. The band include two drummers and one saxophonist, with Guillaume Cazalet covering everything else: bass, guitar, sitar, flute, trumpet... whatever he can find, it seems. Its press claims that it's the "quintessential mystical and psychedelic journey of 2020." Even having already reviewed the Oranssi Pazuzu album, I'm not going to argue.

What I will say is that, as wild as this is, and it does indeed dip deep into free jazz, it felt surprisingly accessible to me. Tribal drumming and pixie-like saxophone render the first two pieces of music lively, engaging and shockingly organic. Sure, Lamasthu slows things down to paint a sonic picture of a trip through Hell itself, dark and eerie from the outset but all the more eerie as the layers peel away with us left in near silence, punctuated only by demonic voices. At least that's what I heard. Its full title is translated from the French to Lamasthu: Seeder of the Primordial Fungal Kingdom and Infanticide of Neogene Monkeys. And yes, there's definitely some Ummagumma weirdness here, but this is heavier and freer and jazzier.

These titles do offer clues as to what's going on, or at least to what we ought to be thinking about as they play. These opening songs comprise a six track cycle called To the Earth. The full title of part one is To the Earth: Daiitoku-Myōō no ōdaiko 大威徳明王 鼓童—L'Impact de Théia durant l’Éon Hadéen, which includes three languages and two scripts: English, Japanese and French. So let's figure out what all that means.

The "odaiko" is the largest drum in a taiko performance of Japanese drumming; this one belongs to Daiitoku Myōō, one of the five Great Light Kings of Esoteric Buddhism. Google Translate tells me the kanji translate from the Japanese to Yamantaka Kodo, but Yamantaka happens to be a Sanskrit name for Daiitoku Myōō. Kodo has a double meaning: both "children of the drum" and "heartbeat", which is the primal source of all rhythm. The French means "The Impact of Théia during the Hadean Aeon", referring to an ancient planet that may have collided with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, so creating our moon.

So we're delving into Japanese mythology and archeoastronomy. Nganga brings in African culture in primal times, the title belonging to a spiritual healer, and Lamasthu Mesopotamian, as she's the most terrible of all female demons. Ptah Sokar Osiris is an Egyptian composite funerary deity, while Enūma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth. Clearly, there's a lot of birth and death here. We're also running through billions of years: two supereons, at least five eons and mere periods like the Carboniferous. What are Neptunian Maximalism telling us in this grand sweep of history and mythology?

Well, I'm glad you asked! "By exploring the evolution of the human species," the band "question the future of the living on Earth, propitiating a feeling of acceptance for the conclusion of the so called 'anthropocene' era and preparing us for the incoming 'probocene' era, imagining our planet ruled by superior intelligent elephants after the end of humanity." So there you have it. I think I need notes. It's all ritual, but it's heavily researched, multi-cultural, multi-mythological ritual that's explored in fascinating style.

To the Moon encompasses the next six pieces of music, with three of those being about Vajrabhairava, a third name for Daiitoku Myōō/Yamantaka, this time the name used in Tibetan Buddism. The reason why Yamantaka is important is because he destroyed Yama, the God of Death, thus stopping samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, which is the goal of the journey towards enlightenment. I guess if you're going to go with a concept, it's worth making it a deep one. I couldn't name one deeper than this.

Oddly for such a desirable goal, Zâr is doomier in nature with a lot more cymbals in play, aspects that continue throughout this suite. While much of this feels theatrical, the initial part of Vajrabhairava, The Summoning, is especially evocative. It seems like it should be performed live while demons roam the stage, speaking to us in dark voices. The final part, Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!, is thoroughly theatrical as well, initially an assault of percussion, mostly sticks banging against each other rather than drums. It feels like there's an associated dance that I'm missing. Even when it calms down, it still feels like it's a soundtrack to something visual.

The third part of Vajrabhairava is the one that spoke to me, The Great Wars of Quaternary Era Against Ego. It's chaotic free jazz for a while, until the emergency of a driving trance-inducing riff that sounds like it's played on bass and emphasised by percussion. It persists but so does the chaos, like we're here to witness the age-old battle between chaos and order in microcosm.

That leaves four pieces of music to constitute To the Sun and they're generally longer and much more patient. With the sole exception of the previous track, Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!, Eôs, the first part of To the Sun, is twice as long as anything thus far, at eighteen and a half minutes. It takes its time, pitting that exploratory saxophone of Jean Jacques Duerinckx against a set of dark textures, sans any percussion, and, when it evolves, it does so into a commanding presence, as if this were an avant-garde opera. The latter part of the song gets all trippy and psychedelic.

I'm not as fond of To the Sun generally. It doesn't seem to have as much purpose to it, Heliozoapolis a fifteen minute jumble of hesitant jazz drumming, sitar noodling and ambient spirituality. It does end well for me, but it's easily my least favourite piece of music here and the rest of To the Sun pales when compared to To the Moon and especially To the Earth.

But hey, given how generous this release is, it's still at least a full album more originality than most albums can boast and I'm comfortable giving it a solid 8/10. The best music here is easily worthy of the highest ratings I give out. Now, I need to come back down to Earth for whatever I can follow this with.

Robby Krieger - The Ritual Begins at Sundown (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Aug 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

In case you don't know the name, Robby Krieger is most famous for being the guitarist in the Doors, but I should emphasise right off the bat that this doesn't remotely sound like the Doors, even on the song that's a Doors cover, which is Yes, the River Knows, the original being on Waiting for the Sun. It seems fair to point out that the Doors' incredible six album output (ignoring the two post-Morrison albums) came in a five year burst. As crucial as they are to rock history, they really weren't around for long. Jim Morrison died when I was only three months old and I turn fifty next year.

Instead, this sounds rather like Frank Zappa and for very good reason. It's psychedelic and progressive but it's also instrumental and it trawls in a lot of jazz. The other cover here is a Zappa cover, Chunga's Revenge, originally on the 1970 album of the same name. This album is produced by Arthur Barrow, a bassist for Zappa in the late seventies and early eighties, before he joined up with Krieger, with whom he's frequently collaborated since. It features many other Zappa alumni, including Tommy Mars, Chad Wackerman,Jock Ellis and multi-instrumentalist Sal Marquez.

Now, many dislike Zappa for his scatalogical and often puerile lyrics, but many adore him for being as inventive a musician as perhaps ever been associated with popular music. If you only know songs with sexually deviant lyrics like Bobby Brown (Goes Down) or novelty songs like Valley Girl, check out Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar or Hot Rats, two entirely instrumental albums that will give you a very different glimpse into his output. You'll find that this Robby Krieger album, his seventh solo studio album and his first in the ten years since Singularity, sits very nicely in that sort of company.

What's perhaps most telling is that The Drift, the song before Chunga's Revenge here, feels even more like Zappa than the cover of the Zappa song does. This take on Chunga's Revenge does, at least, sound a more like Zappa than Yes, the River Knows sounds like the Doors. Tommy Mars plays Ray Manzarek's piano part on that song faithfully, while Krieger initially emulate's Morrison's part before shifting to his own and he never did play a guitar solo the same way twice. Given that everything else takes a jazz fusion approach to prog/psych, the only song that Krieger has played on before (and which he wrote) seems oddly out of place.

That very carefully constructed reinterpretation aside, this album feels wild and free. It's not just the jazz, because not all jazz sounds wild and free, but the energy that flows between the musicians. It's as if, restricted from touring, they particularly enjoyed bouncing off each other in the studio. I've been a lot more productive as a writer this year, because COVID took away all my events; Krieger has done a lot more in the studio and apparently has a couple more albums "in the can ready to go".

That energy is most obvious on the pieces of music that come after the plaintive Yes, the River Knows: The Hitch and Dr. Noir. Titles aside, which conjure up black and white movies for me, the music is just as vibrant and colourful as the cover art on the album. It's so vibrant that it bounces and, by the time we get to Bianca's Dream, I was bouncing too. There are two saxophonists on this album, plus trumpet and trombone players and a flautist, but Krieger is the only guitarist, so the solos he swaps aren't with the rock instruments we might expect from a member of the Doors.

The biggest problem I had here was to try to figure out highlights. For all that it's an enjoyable piece of music, I'd call out Yes, the River Knows as the low point any without hesitation. In isolation, it's an impressive revamp; on this album, it's just an interlude. The other nine tracks, however, are harder to pick apart. They play very consistently indeed, so much so that it's easier to pick favourite sections of each and least favourite sections too. That's a great riff on opener What Was That?, but there are slow transitions that don't do anything for me. And so on across the album.

And, at the end of the day, the weirdest realisation is that I think I dug the saxophone solos, by Vince Denham and Chuck Manning, a bit more than I did the guitar ones from Robby Krieger, whose name is on the cover. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed his contributions too and it's because of him that the folk we hear got together in the first place, but it highlights how much of a band performance this is. Any Doors fans looking for a guitar album by their hero really aren't going to find it here. Those who are open to something different might just love this.

Djabe - The Magic Stag (2020)

Country: Hungary
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I hadn't heard of Djabe until now, but they've built quite an international audience for a difficult to categorise Hungarian band through their collaborations with Steve Hackett, the guitarist of Genesis (and much more) fame. They've been around since 1995, but it seems that he began working with them in 2002 when their founder, Attila Égerházi, took on the distribution of Hackett's albums in Hungary. Since then, they've recorded and performed together frequently, Hackett describing them as "the best band I have ever played with." He co-wrote some of this album and plays on seven of its eleven songs, plus the bonus track on the vinyl edition.

Djabe means "freedom", not in Hungarian but in an African language family called Akan, which goes a long way to highlight how this band are rooted in world music. The first sounds you'll hear, during an instrumental intro called Beginning of Legends, are drums, flutes, piano and a Hungarian lute called a cobza. It's exotic and evocative and it sets a fantastic scene. So, they play folk music, or for those of us not in Hungary, world music.

The title track plays in that territory too, but it's clearly prog rock except when it's jazz. Djabe play an enticing prog/jazz fusion, though it's hardly aggressive. Their jazz style is smooth but never less than interesting because of the different sounds it trawls in. The Magic Stag features complex drums and a startling bass, along with a laid back vocal from drummer Péter Kaszás, who also sings on Down by the Lakeside. That one's less progressive and less jazzy, but it's still both with that smooth voice lending a real mainstream touch. Take the Alan Parsons Project and yacht rock them up.

In between those two vocal pieces, Power of Wings is even more immersed in jazz; it's an instrumental that starts with sitar and saxophone, which might seem like an odd mix, and gradually passes themes on to more traditional instruments, like Attila Égerházi's guitar. Far Away is jazzy too, reminding of a Yes instrumental, complete with prominent bass runs, but moved back towards smooth territory with a prominent trumpet. Both of these pieces move themes around the instruments, swapping solos and improvisations, then passing the torch on again. I dig the instrumental fusion much more than those songs with voice, not entirely because of the outstanding basswork of Tamá Barabás.

So, Djabe are a world/folk/prog/jazz group, who write complex songs, most but not all instrumentals, even when telling a story. They're all reasonably but not excessively long. Down by the Lakeside is one of the short songs here, at a blink over five minutes. Power of Wings sits at the short end of the range that Djabe are clearly comfortable with, just shy over seven minutes. Of the ten songs on offer, half of them fit within a minute above that baseline. Only the closer, Uncertain Time, goes further, nudging a little past nine minutes. Seven is clearly the sweet spot for improvisational music to breathe.

Thus far, Hackett has only played on the title track, which he also co-wrote with his wife Jo, but that's misleading because he plays guitar on Unseen Sense, the fifth full track, and contributes to every one of the pieces still to come. I can see why he enjoys playing with Djabe, because he fits in here without remotely standing out, as you might expect an aging British prog rocker to do when teaming up with a Hungarian jazz band. It all feels completely natural, as if his guitar is an established component in a time-honoured Djabe sound.

I don't know if the proggier pieces are because of his influence or because that's always been part of a Djabe sound that dates back a quarter of a century. There's prog in most of these pieces, even if jazz is a little more overt. Then again, this is arguably less jazzy than the current Focus album and how does that usually get categorised? Frankly, I was looking for more prog than I got, and more world too, but the jazz is often proggy, even if Áron Koós-Hutás's trumpet, which is a delightful addition to sweeter pieces like Two Little Snowflakes, always brings it back to the jazz side of things.

The most world we get is Rising Horizon, which is built on keyboards and vocals by Égerházi's father, who recorded them at a folklore festival in Transsylvania in the seventies. It's very world music, albeit backed by very western keyboard textures, for a few minutes before it reverts to the laid back jazz of the previous few pieces. The most prog we get is Uncertain Time, that nine minute closer, anchored by Hackett's acoustic guitar but with that trumpet soaring above. And, in many ways, this starts well and just keeps getting better. I'm certainly going to listen to this a lot more.

The Steve Howe Trio - New Frontier (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Jazz/Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 27 Sep 2019
Sites: Wikipedia

Name November was all about me catching up with a glut of releases from the well known artists and important lesser known ones who apparently waited to release their new work all at once. In hindsight, November shone because of bands at the heavier end of the spectrum: Opeth, Insomnium, Alcest, Mayhem, Nile and Exhorder. Only Jeff Lynne's ELO album really stood out amongst them from a lighter perspective, so I'm interested to see if anything else light might play well in that company.

So here's Steve Howe, best known as the guitarist for prog rock legends Yes (and their temporary continuation in Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe), but he also deserves recognition for his work for arena rock bands such as Asia and GTR. Add a many solo albums, plenty of collaborations and guest appearances on albums for artists as varied as Lou Reed, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and William Shatner and you have a serious rock career.

The Steve Howe Trio is a jazz group featuring Howe on guitar, his son Dylan on drums and Ross Stanley on Hammond organ. There are no vocals and there's no bass. As you might imagine, it's easy listening both in the sense that it really is easy to listen to and in the sense that it could well be piped out of hidden speakers in hotel lobbies. This is their third album in just over a decade, following 2008's The Haunted Melody and 2010's Travelling.

However, it's also interesting stuff if we focus in and, with Howe the major driving force and with fellow Yes alumnus Bill Bruford contributing to three of the ten tracks, it's not entirely shorn of the prog rock elements that we might be forgiven for seeking out. And, while this is clearly Howe exploring a new musical direction, hence the title, there's prog rock here, especially early on.

Hiatus, for instance, may be an odd title for an opening track, but it's an impressive one whose major flaw is that it ends too soon. This is prog rock, especially before the drums kick in, with Howe coaxing delightful sounds out of his guitar and Stanley's Hammond doing exactly what we don't expect. The drums don't add much here, but the combination of guitar and keyboard could easily have built into a Yes song, with a full band joining in when it ends.

Left to Chance, the longest song on the album at six and a half minutes, is prog for a while too, again mostly through the interplay between guitar and organ. Dylan Howe gets the picture a minute in and gets interesting too. If the song progresses into more overt jazz territory after a while, that's OK because this is a jazz trio, but Yes fans coming to this will have found it worthy. Of course, it's hard not to imagine Yes fans not getting into Howe's guitar, whatever it is that he's doing.

I'm not remotely well versed enough in jazz to recognise anything that this trio borrow from the expansive jazz songbook, but some parts do sound rather familiar, especially on Showdown but also on Fair Weather Friend and others. It doesn't matter, of course. Jazz is all about reinventing material, often in an improvisatory setting. This doesn't seem loose enough to be a freeform jam but that doesn't mean that they aren't riffing on older material in new songs.

I enjoyed this interlude from the heavier side of name November. It's hardly going to be of interest to all rock fans and it's not remotely challenging, but anyone into prog and jazz would likely get a kick out of it. Even with only three instruments recorded in a bare bones setting, there's plenty of interesting stuff going on.