Niels Lan Doky
River Of Time
(Inner Adventures Records)
★★★★

NIELS LAN DOKY is a Copenhagen pianist with Vietnamese roots who has spent much of his jazz life in the US, to which he migrated in the early 1980s, collaborating with a host of musical eminences such as Charlie Haden, Woody Shaw, Bobby Hutcherson and John McLaughlin.

River of Time, recorded in Denmark with bassist Tobias Dall and drummer Niclas Bardeleben, is suffused with a haunting Nordic lyricism, full of subliminal melody and evocations of the sea and nature.

The live Nature of the Business is a pounding, joyous trio romp, while the title tune is rhythmically and tunefully reflective, generated by Barbeleben’s brushes and Dall’s cavernous bassline. Greasy Sauce sizzles, while Sita’s Mood is engrossingly calm and empathetic.

The tranquil beauty of World Peace leads directly to Hope 2020, which radiates true serenity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LBYVvSaS30
The Mark Harvey Group
A Rite for All Souls
(America’s Musicworks)
★★★★

A RITE for All Souls is the first-ever release of a recording made in 1971 in Boston, led by Mark Harvey, Methodist minister and founder of the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra.

It speaks directly and resonantly of its era, with Harvey playing trumpet, Peter H Bloom on woodwinds and percussionists Craig Ellis and Michael Standish — a free and powerfully inventive quartet.

The standout track is Ellis’s Napalm: Rice Paper. Part poem, part Vietnam war protest and part anthem, it has haunting lyrics: “How they run/screams/fading back/in/to the forest/how it clings/there/to the skin/like a flower/the flesh/curling/falling away.”

It is a lyric of its times and all times and the quartet blow and strike with indignant power all through the record, which simmers, rampages, reflects and mourns.

Musicianship and resistance mesh and regenerate to 2020 and show how history always returns.

Tomeka Reid and Alexander Hawkins
Shards And Constellations
(Intakt Records)
★★★★★

CELLIST Tomeka Reid learned her artistry playing alongside veterans of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of Chicago like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell. Pianist Alexander Hawkins generated much of his keyboard fire in a duo with Cape Town drums griot Louis Moholo-Moholo and British free jazz stalwarts Evan Parker and John Edwards.

They make an ever-surprising and compelling duo, the true inheritors of three continents of sound.

Their pointillistic, spiky notes, whether it is Reid’s pizzicato strings or Hawkins’s strident phrases on If Becomes Is, embolden each other’s musical power. They create a transatlantic unity of resounding strength, unifying multiple traditions.
 
Their intuitive sonic understanding is uncanny and when they play violinist Leroy Jenkins's elegy Albert Ayler (His Life was too Short), they forge a deeply emotive tribute that still echoes movingly.