Alison Rayner Quintet A Magic Life

(Blow the Fuse Records BTF 1613CD)

ALISON RAYNER is a British bassist, born in Bromley, Kent in 1952.

She played bass guitar in the feminist jazz-funk band Jam Today in the ’70s and the all-women group The Guest Stars in the ’80s.

I first heard her holding the rhythmic pulse of the 15 horns of Annie Whitehead’s World Music Workshop.

On her own album A Magic Life, she leads a quintet of mature musical souls unafraid to use their music to tell stories of their lives and the lives of others, with powerful musicianship and a sense of true sonic honesty and originality.

Alongside Rayner’s acoustic bass is pianist Steve Lodder and drummer Buster Birch, with guitarist Deirdre Cartwright and Diane McLoughlin on saxophones.

The album sleeve is evocatively designed, with the five musicians looking through the foliage of a tropical forest, in the company of a toucan and an elephant.

Perhaps this is a reference to the track The Trunk Call, one of six tunes composed by Rayner, whose Charlie Haden-like earthen throb digs through her album’s every track.

The title tune opener is in memory of a close friend, who in her own epitaph judged that her life had been “magic.”

Rayner also remembered a question a boy once asked her: “Is music stronger than magic?” Her answer was that music is a union of magic and logic. We don’t know what he said to that but the answer of her artistry is in every second of this engrossing album.

McLoughlin’s alto cuts a transcendent path through folk melodies of Rayner’s mother’s Shetland origins and Lodder’s piano rocks alongside Birch’s pounding drums.

Musicophilia follows, with Rayner’s own bass showing its love and blessings to her inspiration, the German bassist Eberhard Weber. Cartwright’s discursive guitar adds its own persuasive argument.

Then comes Rayner’s praise-song to the elephant, using rhythms that she once heard at a temple festival in Kerala.

Birch’s percussion is full of internationalist life and Lodder enjoys a swinging chorus before McLoughlin’s aery solo flies between London and the south of India with a weightless ease.

Rayner describes her Mayday as a “fusion of green and red elements: green being the relationship to the earth and nurturance; red being the relationship to people, useless toil and class struggle.”

Cartwright’s many-voiced and eloquent guitar is prominent — howling, rejoicing, agonising, vocalising. McLoughlin wrote New Day to insist that every dawn brings a new human journey.

It’s a call-and-answer tune, a colloquy of five instrumental voices, with Lodder’s solo especially fine and the curling chorus of McLoughlin’s horn burning with a potent optimism.

In Swanage Bay, Rayner writes a childhood narrative about the separation of parents, remembering a last family holiday in Dorset.

McLoughlin’s exposition of the story has an underside of sadness beautifully told, an elegy in itself to lost happiness, her horn the storyteller.

Lodder wrote The OK Chorale, the humour of the title telling that he went where the music took him. He intended to write an African-inspired piece but it became something completely different.

For a jazz musician, it is as if “planning is an illusion. We are all pieces of driftwood,” he maintains.

And his theme floats with its five interpreters, with Cartwright’s solo and McLoughlin’s chorus telling their own audacious stories and Lodder’s own piano narrative seeming to burst from keyboard sounds of centuries gone, now transmuting into the present.

Friday’s Child closes the album, a Rayner tune dedicated to her mother. Compact and lucid in both its brevity and its beauty, its portraiture of the past seems to point wilfully to the future, with all members achieving an abiding sense of oneness, as if this is a song for all mothers, everywhere.

For this is an album of unified musical dexterity, with not a note wasted and with sound as story — clear and undisguised, deeply affecting and unashamedly open.