By Kenneth Blanchard
Stuart Wilding / Mike Adcock – Apophony (Confront Recordings 2025)
One of the joys of Bandcamp (may its name be praised!) is that I get
notices for new recordings almost every day. This week three new
releases were brought to my attention. Taken together, they provide
a good sample of the audio appetites that set our writers and
readers apart from other jazz fans.
The title Apophony is a term indicating a change in the
pronunciation of a vowel that carries some grammatical information.
For example: blood, bleed, and bled. It also produces a nice
resonance in English with epiphany, which my spell checker was more
comfortable with.
One of the most significant indicators of free jazz is that the
texture of sounds is as important, if not more so, than the
narrative or emotional content of a recording. It’s a pretty good
bet that if the list of instruments includes table tennis balls,
Villahe hall parquet floor (Wilding) or “tuned roof slates”
(Adcock), texture and percussive expressionism is going to be a
major focus. That the former also plays drums and the latter piano
means that the artists have not completely severed their ties to
more traditional composition.
The title cut marries high pitched bell-like sounds (think of
Christmas ornaments being poured into a soft bag) to mostly
low-pitched, evocative notes from the keyboard. “Pipes for Paul”
wraps a silky, tubular sound around electronic, almost space-jazz
vibes. You have to love song titles like “Doublefish,” and “Reverse
Antelope,” which begins with an angelic sound followed by bird
chirps.
Dominic Lash / Mark Wastell – Polyvalent Creativity (Confront
Recordings 2025)
This recording is more conventional only because the instruments are
limited to electric guitar (Lash) and drums, percussion (Wastell).
The opening cut, “potential” sound like the artists started tuning
up and never got around to playing anything else. The sound is so
rich that you will be perfectly happy with that, if genuine free
jazz is your thing.
The subtitles of the five cuts (e.g., “2. commitment, 3. activation,
and 4. Fulfilment”) appear to be references to Coltrane’s A Love
Supreme. I need to listen to this several more times to see if it
holds.
Steve Beresford / Pierpaolo Martino / Mark Sanders– Be S-Mart
(Confront Recordings 2025)
All three of these releases are worth the investment in time that
they invite. By far my favorite is the last. Beresford (prepared
piano, electronics, objects) Martino (double bass, electronics) and
Sanders (drums). Unlike the Apophony and Polyvalent Creativity,
there is a definite, if mostly one-dimensional melody. Be S-Mart
consists of two parts (Dark Materials, 1 and 2). It is a
high-energy expedition into a land populated with lots of unfamiliar
but unmistakenly organic voices. I found myself wanting to look up
to see what was perched in the branches of the next alien tree. If
this is a fair sample of Confront Recordings catalog, it would pay
to keep an eye on that enterprise.