Otherlands Trio
Star Mountain
(Intakt Records)
★★★★☆

THE Otherlands Trio are an engrossing threesome. Anyone who hears the Virginia-born alto saxophonist Darius Jones is likely to be frazzled by the scintillation of his outrageous sonics. In a trio context with the subtle, multisonic drums of New Yorker Eric McPherson and the earthen Memphis bassist Stephan Crump, the collective waxened messages are even more intense.

When Jones grips a theme, as in the opener Metamorpheme, he holds onto it and won’t let go, as if it were crucial to his musical existence. McPherson and Crump pick up his prolonged determination and the three create rhapsodies of riffs, sirens and sometimes agonised instrumental voices as if they were heralding a new age of sound.

Hear the brief track, Instared. McPherson rustles and rattles, Crump plunges and Jones howls and implores. It is a music of sublimated, emotive speculation, setting the listener’s mind on the very edge of knowing.

Isabelle Bodenseh
Dignity
(GLM Music)
★★★☆☆

THE French/German flautist, Isabelle Bodenseh, plays bass flute, no common jazz instrument. In her album Dignity with her quartet of Thomas Bauser (Hammond organ), Lars Binder (drums) and Johannes Maikranz (guitar) she dedicates its music to her family, and in particular her severely disabled daughter Juliette.

“This music grew out of lived moments,” she says. “Some uplifting, some challenging, but always full of movement.” Her Suite for Dignity expresses this lucidly. The dark tones of her flute are rich in human feeling, skipping high and delving deep, wrapped in melody and improvised beauty, with Maikranz’s deft guitar providing a brotherly counterpoint.

This is a record that reaches out from its intimacy, and in its mild, undemonstrative way touches upon implicit, half-hidden emotions. None of the musicians overplay, but keep their sounds close, often expressing their artistry through softness and quasi-quietude. Listening spawns reflection, all the way through.

Kris Davis and the Lutoslawski Quartet
The Solastalgia Suite
(Pyroclastic Records)
★★★★☆

AS a young immigrant to Western Canada in the 1960s, every weekend I experienced the beauty and sublimity of the Rockies, their rivers, peaks and lakes. Now British Columbia-born pianist Kris Davis reflects on her homeland: “I see the changes when I go back home to Canada. The environment’s different, the climate’s different …. my feelings are of loss and mourning.”

In her Solastalgia Suite she joins with the Polish Lutoslawski Quartet to set down these feelings and put them in a global context, with tracks concerning the denuded Ghost Reefs or Pressure and Yield — perhaps to the spoliation of Alberta with its huge resources of oil sands, which the exploitative and menacing Trump-eyes see as raging profits.

The string quartet play with a melancholic, elegiac beauty and Davis’s compositions and piano eloquence send their messages and warnings of calamitous environmental folly in this profoundly meaningful musical journey.