CD Feature/ Spyweirdos, John Morjopoulos and Floros Floridis: "Epistrophy at Utopia"
TobiasJust like contemporary composition, Jazz will never be content with its own development. “It’s not a questions of stopping progress”, the opening sample to a recent concert performance by the colourful trio at hand lamented, “So much as just keeping up with it.” Almost as a direct consequence, “Epistrophy at Utopia” is taking a different question as a guideline: If you don’t understand the past, how can you shape the future?
It can hardly be a coincidence that one of many possible answers should come from Greece, where questioning things at their root is a deeply felt tradition. It is also a country, where diverging timelines are colliding in a unique way. And maybe there is a certain logic to the fact that two of the three performers here are studied Physicists: Science and Improvisation are not so much opposing poles but merely different sides to the same Janus-headed coin, after all.
Whatever the reason may be, “Epistrophy at Utopia” pretty accurately sums up where Jazz has arrived in 2008, without ever forgetting about how it got there. Opening tune “Epistrophy” is a modern take on a Thelonious Monk classic and creates an almost perfect band-illusion, with only occasional dub echoes and quirky ghost melodies revealing the sonic fata morgana. “Raymond Bound”, too, is an ode to all but forgotten days and the pioneering spirit of Pianist and composer Ray Scott, which opens with an unruly groove, but fades out silently and from far away, as though it were being broadcast by an EVP transmitter.
These two tracks are not the only examples of how the album’s mastermind Spyweirdos has managed to preserve a certain nostalgic feeling with the help of the new millenium’s technology. It is never quite clear whether he is mangling and bending archival samples into bizarre and all but unrecognisable forms or, on the contrary, whether he is forcing completely abstract electronics into sounding like an intimate Jazz ensemble.
“Ethnic Music Cleansing”, for example, start out with the synthetically humming bass lines, smooth brass impulses, breakbeats and seventh piano chords typical of sophisticated Drum n Bass, but then flows straight into an organic exchange between human players – or possibly into an immaculate copy. Only dreamy closer “The Letter after Omega”, made up of dense layers of drones, tiny glitches, microscopic organ swell and intricate drum machine beats, disconnects itself from this approach, but makes up for it by entering into a lively dialogue between electronics and reed improvisation.
It is almost as though the musicians were claiming that to recreate the original spirit of Jazz, one needs to build it from scratch, accepting that the “golden days of glory” are long gone. They may have a point. Trying too hard to come to terms with the inevitable advance of progress has made many “modern Jazz” and contemporary composition records sound forced. In stark contrast, “Epistrophy at Utopia”, despite all of its ambitions, is a relaxed and physical work – and an album its creators have every right to be thoroughly content with.
By Tobias Fischer
Homepage: Spyweirdos
Homepage: Floros Floridis
Homepage: Ad Noiseam Records