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MUSIC Best of 2020: Jazz albums

THREE albums of 2020 are not only powerful jazz artefacts that challenge and break through many musical norms and genres but are also resonating commentaries on today — the year’s key moments expressed in raw and beautifully inventive sounds.

Pianist Lafayette Gilchrist is from Baltimore, a city steeped in resistance to racism, and that experience  is starkly intoned on his trio’s double album Now in such tracks as the rampaging Assume the Position.

“When you come to Baltimore,” he says, “you need to show some respect for the struggle within the town and how strong the people are on the ground here.”

Gilchrist’s pianism is a compendium of jazz history and you can hear Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Joys in his notes, along with James P Johnson’s New York stride and echoes of Theolonius Monk, Bud Powell and Cecil Taylor.

An Everyman of jazz piano, driven on by his trio confreres, drummer Eric Kennedy and bassist Herman Burnie, there’s a lyrical beauty to many of his tunes.

Love ballads such as Say a Prayer for Our Love or Newly Arrived show the indivisibility of love and struggle, evincing again how Gilchrist is a pianist for all seasons.

A very different record is Balcony Lullabies by Danish guitarist Mikkel Ploug.

During the months of lockdown, he has played solo guitar on his apartment balcony every evening for his Copenhagen neighbours. “Maybe I was trying to send a message to the world,” he says.

Amid the succession of melodic Danish folk tunes and ballads are also You Are My Sunshine, Over the Rainbow and the deeply affecting John Lennon tune Julia, dedicated to his mother.
 
Kate Westbrook’s album with her Granite Band turns to Milton’s epic Paradise Lost for her title, Earth felt the Wound, and never has she sung with such protean power.

Lyricism, blues, prophecy, exhortation, admonition and menace are all in her octogenarian voice, as if life’s fullness and forebodings pour out of her words.

In Storm Petrel she envisages a catastrophe of a deluged world: “Do you hear the drowned band/Playing in deep water street?” she sings, alongside Billie Bottle’s bass like a flat stone skimming across an ever-rising seascape.

She leaves the warnings of Weltende Begins to Roz Harding’s eloquently free saxophone or the ominous pathos of husband Mike’s piano intro to Once Upon a Time.

Her voice, in unison with Matthew North’s guitar, “wise up” blues in Bathing Belles and Fiscal Analysts and on Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance — embellished by  Coach York’s buoyant drums — captivates. And she has her moment of augury with: “Before they ask us to pay the bill and while we still have the chance.”

Cabaret and truth have rarely found such an amalgam.

CHRIS SEARLE

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