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‘Thread of Life’, the first solo album by Magnus Ostrum, the drummer for renowned nu jazz band EST, is very much lacking in displays of his ample drum skills and instead focuses on moody introspective instrumentals that sometimes have very little percussion at all. The music on here is made up of mellow ambient rock, ECM styled melancholy background music and just a few modern jazzy numbers. This tendency for nu jazz artists to lean towards the ambient post-rock style has me wondering when does this music stop being jazz at all. There are quite a few cuts on here that I would have a hard time calling jazz of any kind, even of the ‘nu’ variety. Certainly music doesn’t have to be jazz to be good and its very possible that Ostrum set out to make an ambient album with little thought for jazz, but I also wonder if there is also a tendency to forget what made jazz great and special in the first place, ..rhythm.
This isn’t a bad album, I enjoyed some of the mood pieces at first until it all started to seem a little too maudlin and then finally the sheer length of the CD wore me out and towards the end I was really wanting to listen to anything that was the opposite of this gray colored ambience, possibly James Brown or maybe even KC and the Sunshine Band. If you are looking for the jazz on here, ‘Piano Break Song’ and ‘The Haunted Thoughts and the Endless Fall' are probably your best bets. The best of the ambient pieces include ‘Longing’ and ‘Hymn Parts I and II’, both of which have nice melodies that recall some of Brian Eno’s best work in the mid-70s.