Joe Lovano, that giant American elder of jazz reeds-playing, nowadays seems – rather like the equally eminent https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/15/charles-lloyd-the-sky-will-still-be-there-tomorrow-review-five-stars" rel="nofollow - saxophone master Charles Lloyd – to be simmering all his decades of timeless tunes and exquisite passing phrases down to essences. The 72-year-old Ohio-born sax star and occasional drummer’s partners here are Polish pianist https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/apr/15/jazz.shopping#:~:text=A%20three-way%20free%20conversation,that%20grows%20with%20each%20listening." rel="nofollow - Marcin Wasilewski’s collectively freethinking trio – Homage’s shape was formed on extensive tours with them, and a week in 2023 at New York’s Village Vanguard club that acted as an impromptu rehearsal.
Song-rooted American jazz-making and give-and-go European free-jazz have become intertwined within Lovano’s later-life soundworld. Wasilewski’s compatriot Zbigniew Seifert’s Love in the Garden is reworked as a rapturous tenor-sax ballad with every soft horn outbreath embraced in silvery keyboard streams. Lovano’s Golden Horn evokes the iconic four-note hook of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme before his tenor sax eases in on hints and fragments, then sweeps into fast linear post-bop. There’s a driving, McCoy Tyneresque solo from Wasilewski and Lovano switches to hand drums, animatedly joining percussionist Michal Miskiewicz – but there’s an exhilarating surprise when the leader whoops back in on the soprano-sax-like Hungarian tárogató.
The title track’s opening short-burst figures turn to unaccompanied and free-collective jamming before an enchanting percussion coda; Giving Thanks is a kaleidoscope of figures on unaccompanied tenor sax; and This Side – Catville, an album highlight, deftly balances a snappy short-phrase melody and rolling free-groove. The recording session apparently captured five hours of these exchanges, so with luck a second volume of this hearteningly harmonious and spontaneous music-making is already in the pipeline.
from www.theguardian.com