Mario Laginha
Jangada
Edition Records
★★★★

The Portuguese pianist Mario Laginha, born in Lisbon in 1960, describes his new album which he calls Jangada (or Raft) as the result of a creative process of “picking up pieces of driftwood and binding them together to form a whole.”

With bassist Bernardo Moreira and drummer Alexandre Frazao, he does just that with his pianism, forging a record of delights from fragments of sound, with a touch that reminds me of the great American pianist Ran Blake, who once made an album called Driftwoods.

Some of Laginha’s compositions have water-based titles, with The Stone Raft (Jangade de Pedra) suggesting a potentially sinking craft. Yet this trio, with Moreira’s sharply-plucked bass (hear his solo on Efedra) and Frazao’s quietly undemonstrative drumming, are beautifully afloat throughout.

Classical embellishments abound, such as the softly serene Chorale No 2, as if sheer musical genre is irrelevant to this trio’s memorable artistry.

Sara Schoenbeck
Sara Schoenbeck
Pyroclastic Records
★★★★★

There aren’t many bassoon virtuosi in jazz. The great swinging tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet played it as a second horn, and Sheffield’s wondrous Mick Beck is a brilliant improvising bassoonist. Hear his album Life Echoes, if you want beautiful proof.

Californian Sara Schoenbeck’s debut eponymous album sets her with one of nine brilliant partners on each track, from flautist Nicole Mitchell to soprano saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and bassist Mark Dresser in a carnival of superb bassoon duets.

In every successive context Schoenbeck’s bassoon sounds different, and it is this powerfully diverse soundscape that makes her album so magnetic.

For me, the Sand Dune Trilogy with the birdsong of Nicole Mitchell stands out, along with the drums/bassoon duet with Harris Eisenstadt’s rolling, serpentine percussion. Throughout it is as if Schoenbeck’s notes have risen from the earth, with their depth and subterranean power, full of raw, smouldering and emotive fire.

Alexander Hawkins Mirror Canon
Break a Vase
Intakt Records
★★★★★

After Alexander Hawkins toured with the great jazz innovator and improviser Anthony Braxton in 2020, it provoked him to seek “more territories to go and explore.” A part of that discovery is this album Break a Vase, conjured with drummers Stephen Davis and Richard Olatunde Baker, bassist Neil Charles, guitarist Otto Fischer and the saxophonist of Sons of Kemet Shabaka Hutchings.

There is a feast of rhythmic percussion here, propelling Hawkins and Hutchings to new soundscapes inspired by their months touring and recording with Cape Town drums griot Louis Moholo-Moholo.

Listen to the rhythmic power of Generous Souls pushing them both powerfully forward, while the more sculptured vibe of Faint Making Stones unleashes Hutchings for a contemplative, almost mournful solo before Hawkins strikes out stridently.

It’s an album of broken treasures restored, re-imagined and re-invented in a soundscape of new freedoms from six vibrant musicians in constant renewal and creative motion.