Loyal readers of this blog may know about my ambiguous relationship
with jazz-rock and fusion. In the early 1980s I was fascinated by
musicians like Al DiMeola, Stanley Clarke (and their project Return
to Forever), the United Jazz & Rock Ensemble or Jean-Luc Ponty
because I was impressed by their virtuosity. However, I quickly got
bored of it since it often seemed to be about showing off that
virtuosity and less about authenticity, creativity, subtle ideas and
sound. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned to appreciate
some of my old albums again (e.g. John McLaughlin’s Inner Mounting
Flame, Weather Report’s first album or Tony Williams’s Million
Dollar Legs). Another reason were newer jazz-rock formations that I
also found exciting, such as The Nels Cline Singers, Bushman’s
Revenge or The Young Mothers. The latter, founded by the Norwegian
bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten during his time in Austin/Texas,
where he lived from 2009 to 2021, actually had the goal of combining
as much cross-genre music as possible. Therefore, they first played
live extensively for several years before their first album, A
Mothers Work Is Ever Done, was released in 2014. Morose followed in
2018. Finally, Håker Flaten moved back to Norway in 2021 and it took
until 2024 before the band managed to record a new album – quite a
long time in the free jazz scene.
If you already liked the group from their previous albums, you can
sit back and relax, because the open, various approach is still the
band’s main characteristic and the line-up has also remained the
same: Jawwaad Taylor (trumpet, rhymes, electronics and programming),
Jason Jackson (tenor and baritone sax), Stefan Gonzalez (vibraphone,
drums, percussion and voice), Jonathan F. Horne (guitar), Ingebrigt
Håker Flaten (acoustic and electric bass) and Frank Rosaly (drums,
electronics and programming). According to the label, the
songwriting for the new album was more collective than on its
predecessors, which is reflected in an even greater stylistic range.
The Young Mothers once again present an energetic mixture of jazz,
prog-rock, hiphop, electronics and free improvisation, whereby
prefabricated ideas are juxtaposed with free improvisation.
Complexity and directness are no contradiction. However, the
question with such music is whether the result is inconsistent or
whether it has a clear line despite all the diversity. Here the
answer is definitely the latter. Despite the often surprising twists
and turns within the pieces, the music seems well thought out and
organic.
The beginning of the last and longest track on the album, “Scarlet
Woman Lodge“, is reminiscent of Miles Davis’s Get Up With It phase,
before a shouter sneaks into the piece and the guitar and drums push
the track in the direction of heavy metal. The title track and
“Ljim” are relaxed but quite intricate jazz-hip-hop pieces, and you
can’t deny echoes of Alfa Mist. “Hymn” develops away from composed
passages into classic, hard free jazz, while “Song for a Poet“ has
delicate ambient qualities.
Better If You Let It is great fun, hopefully Håker Flaten will
manage to keep the band together. The more projects of this quality
there are, the less chance I have of losing my love for jazz-rock
again.
Better If You Let It is available on vinyl, as a CD and as a
download.