From early childhood, Misha Mullov-Abbado felt he had one destiny in his life. He was born to two international classical celebrities (Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova and superstar conductor Claudio Abbado), and music filled his childhood homes and dominated his education – but most importantly, he unreservedly loved hearing and making it. Yet, Mullov-Abbado’s musical path didn’t quite take the route those early experiences might have implied. 

This month, the 34 year-old double-bassist, composer and bandleader releases Effra (Ubuntu Music), his fourth jazz album as a leader. Effra is an homage to the vitality and companionship of the UK jazz scene; to his home and growing family life in south London’s Brixton; and to the long-time playing partners who have been members of his band since his prizewinning breakout a decade ago from the Royal Academy of Music’s postgrad jazz course. 

Back then, Mullov-Abbado was often commended for the multi-idiomatic sweep of his repertoire, the maturity of his knowledge, and the accessible audacity of his compositions and arrangements. When he won the Royal Academy’s prestigious Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize in 2014, free-sax virtuoso Evan Parker (one of the award’s three judges) said of the qualities of the then 23-year-old’s writing and playing, along with his sense of overall form: “His range of musical reference points means that he can go anywhere from here.” 

Effra’s eight tracks radiantly illustrate all that, but typically for Mullov-Abbado, they do it with patience and craft, and a sense of confidence in how vividly his improvising partners will bring their potential to unpredictable new life. The clatter of the opening ‘Traintracker’ hints at the restless rattle of railway traffic, whilst unleashing a hard-boppish, soulful grooviness from the musicians, notably saxophonists Matthew Herd and Sam Rapley. ‘Bridge’ and ‘Rose’ are slow pieces of quite different character: the first is a quietly joyous ballad (uplifted further by a thrilling Herd alto-sax solo), and the second is a skeletally minimalist piano/bass melody, picked out over long horn harmonies, that erupts into an exhilarating whirl of collective three-horn improv over Scott Chapman‘s ferocious drumming toward the close. There’s a trad-jazzy jive to ‘The Effra Parade’, and a Jobim-celebrating Brazilian dance to ‘Canção De Sobriedade’ – but neither are quite what they seem, since the composer’s fondness for storylines that never quite resolve intriguingly shades both of them.

When we talk on the phone, Misha has his newly-arrived baby on his lap, so we begin with a little mutual reflection (his immediate, mine long-distant) on what those scarily wondrous early moments of parenthood feel like. As it turns out, the possibilities of parenting without such a happy outcome also had a bearing on the genesis of the new album. 

“There was a period in my life some years ago, after my first two albums in 2015 and 2017, of drifting away and not being as into jazz as I’d used to be, and generally feeling a bit lost,” Mullov-Abbado recalls. “I was living in two different parts of the country, which looking back was completely mad. I was half living in the middle of nowhere on Dartmoor – a really beautiful place, amazing to be so connected with nature there – but was also half living in London where most of my career was taking place. My partner at the time and I almost had a child, but then we were told it wouldn’t be able to survive post-birth. This was six and a half years ago – and we separated a year after that loss. Those years were difficult, but coming out of them I did have a bit of a reawakening and realised how much I love my life here in London playing music with amazing musicians, and being friends with amazing musicians.”

Mullov-Abbado began to compose and play again, and by 2020 had recorded a third album, Dream Circus, to follow his much acclaimed 2015 debut New Ansonia (on which his mother Viktoria and soon-to-be-wunderkind Jacob Collier play), and 2017’s Cross-Platform Interchange.

“Then, the pandemic happened,” Mullov-Abbado continues, “so we couldn’t tour, and I was a bit overwhelmed then, confused about what sort of things I wanted to focus on. But despite that, I was feeling so much happier doing what I love, living here in a really vibrant part of London. The pandemic made me all the more certain that this is where I want to be. Then I met my now wife, and two of the tracks on Effra, ‘Bridge’ and ‘Rose’ – her names are Bridget and Rosemary – are dedicated to her.”

I suggest that there’s a cinematic quality, an evocative sense of place, about several of these pieces, but that the narrative of those scenes sometimes feels eerily ambiguous, as if an imaginary protagonist never quite gets to where they thought they’d wind up. Mullov-Abbado confirms that he enjoys delaying resolutions, but the revealing conversation that ensues is also a salutary reminder to a music journalist that a skilled composer’s route to an evocative effect is about manipulating sound, not pictures or scenes in the mind. It’s also a reminder that, for all this band’s attractive allegiances to classic hard-bop, swing or fusion at times, Mullov-Abbado’s ‘points of reference’ – as Evan Parker observed – embrace music of many kinds.

 “‘Traintracker’ is the newest piece on the record,” Mullov-Abbado explains. “And for that, I really wanted to come up with something led by the bassline. I often write at the piano and it’s easy to get into the habit of just being led by chord symbols. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but I was feeling like writing something that came from the bass, and was a bit more soulful and groovy. But I wanted it to be a slow-burner too. Of course I’m inspired by jazz, but I’m inspired by a lot of music, and in this case the German classical/electronic composer Nils Frahm was an influence. Cyclical patterns, repetition, patient slow-building. ‘Rose’ also works like that on this album, and ‘Nanban’, the final track. On ‘Rose’ there’s a kind of musical trick creating the tension, where an E flat pedal – a repeating note – is played by pianist Liam Dunachie throughout, but never resolves in an E flat chord until the end.”

How about ‘The Effra Parade’, the track underlining the album’s title, I ask him. Surely it sounds like a street-parade, with its jivey New Orleans strut?

“That was a lockdown piece,” Mullov-Abbado announces with a laugh. “It’s named after a street near me, and it’s about going on your one walk of the day, trying to get as far from your home as you can, but you keep turning a corner and heading back to where you started. It was originally commissioned for a classical group, and I then adapted it for my band. The samba ‘Canção De Sobriedade’ is a lockdown piece too, but mainly an homage to all the Brazilian music I love, which I’m lucky to play a lot, and it’s particularly inspired by the Antonio Carlos Jobim song ‘No More Blues’, with the first half being in the minor and the second in the major. Mine is ‘Song of Sobriety’ or ‘No More Booze’, which meant taking more care about not getting carried away with drinking in that period of isolation. It’s very effective on live gigs!”

I’ve been hesitant till now to ask Misha Mullov-Abbado about his unique musical evolution, maybe because children of famous parents can have sensitivities about the tensions of going into similar lines of work. But this is no predictable family, and though Viktoria Mullova and Claudio Abbado separated in his infancy, Misha grew up with his mother Viktoria and with his eventual stepfather, the cellist Matthew Barley, and has made genre-bending music with both of them. 

“I’ve been surrounded by classical music my whole life,” Mullov-Abbado says. “I originally played the piano and the French horn, and I loved playing with orchestras, because it’s so interesting to learn how pieces are constructed by playing an instrument at the back. A lot of well-known and successful conductors played an instrument that’s at the back of an orchestra, like a bassoon or timpani, something that lets you see all of what’s going on.”

 Is that how you travelled all the way back to the bass, I ask him.

“I started to play the bass guitar as a teenager,” Mullov-Abbado says. “I just picked one up one day at my uncle’s house, and one of my sisters played guitar, so we started jamming and I was struck by the feeling of how satisfying it was to play single notes but at the bottom of everything. I also sang in school choirs and I was lucky enough to have one of those voices that started really high and broke very gradually, so I sort of went through all the parts and now have a very low voice, so I love singing at the bottom of harmony, as I would do as a bass player. Then there was a school jazz band that I joined and I just grew into a love for that music, and realised slowly that I love improvising. I suppose that was a response to the strict disciplines of playing classical music. I realised in my uni days [studying classical music at Cambridge] that I wanted to go down the jazz route properly, so I took up double bass, thinking it would be a little thing on the side. And then in that first year of the Royal Academy jazz course I actually realised I way prefer this instrument – maybe it’s the physicality and the size of the thing. I came to it quite late, about 21, but then I started listening to Ray Brown, Avishai Cohen, people like that. So I feel very at home improvising, and also being able to write music for improvisers. One of the things I love most about my band now is the ease and inventiveness with which the three horn players improvise all together. Composition is obviously central to Effra, but so is group improvisation, and the two are inseparable for me.”

Before we part, I ask Mullov-Abbado about a recent event that’s inevitably close to his heart, as it is to many people making progressive music and jazz in the UK today, because the subject was a unique combination of an enthusiast and an enabler. The death of Martin Hummel, the creator of Ubuntu Music (on which Effra appears) occurred in early January.

“I’m devastated by it,” Mullov-Abbado says. “Martin was someone who really went above and beyond. I’m so grateful to him because he showed me so much, and was so caring to me and my work. I feel like he really saw me, he really put the effort into listening to my music. When I sent him my album he wrote back the next day saying he’d already listened to it twice, and gave positive feedback about specific tracks. He leaves a huge hole, he was a kind of one-man show in many ways. All that love and care he had for the music he released, it’s really rare to find. There’s so much great contemporary music being made, and musicians depend on one-offs like Martin to make sure it gets heard.”

Misha Mullov-Abbado’s Effra is out on Ubuntu Music on 31 January. The band will play at King’s Place, York Way, N1 9AG, on 22 February 2025.

from https://ukjazznews.com

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