GARD NILSSEN — Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity : Firehouse (review)

GARD NILSSEN — Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity : Firehouse album cover Album · 2015 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
snobb
During the last decade, about a dozen capable drummers made their name by recording ambitious albums playing jazz with an accent on composition, complex arrangements and including elements of contemporary non-jazz music. Tyshawn Sorey and John Hollenbeck are just two to be mentioned among others. Almost intuitively, from every new jazz album recorded by a collective led by the drummer, one can expect jazz based on modern composition first of all.

Norwegian drummer Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity's "Firehouse" is different. A traditional acoustic trio with Swede, double bassist Petter Eldh and Norwegian sax player Andre Roligheten plays free jazz, coming right from the times half a century ago.

"Firehouse" is without a doubt a drummer's album. Nilssen, who is known for his work with Puma and Cortex bands, plays dense, knotty, and often fast high-energy jazz, with a lot of tuneful sax soloing over it. At their hottest moments, Acoustic Unity recalls the other Nordic trio, The Thing. On the other hand, the sax player and the bassist both are noticeably bop-influenced, so there is a lot of music sounding very much as if it comes from the free-boppers of the late 70s or early 70s.

Same way as decades ago, music of such kind is attractive mostly because of its freedom, telepathic interplay, and some organic freshness coming from jazz roots.
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