Alice Zawadzki is an Anglo-Polish vocalist, violinist, pianist and composer who studied composition and has since worked across a vast array of styles – film soundtracks, music theatre and assorted varieties of European folk music. She’s probably best known for her collaborations with assorted British jazz musicians – including a 2016 album of duets with pianist Dan Whieldon – but her second solo album is an excursion way beyond jazz into a kind of ECM-ish art song, with each track so different from the last that it sounds like a compilation. The album’s closer, O Mio Amore, recalls like a Schubert lied; Keeper sounds like a Stevie Wonder ballad (complete with Zawadzki multi-tracking her own gospel choir); on Es Verdad (It Is True) she sings in Spanish while playing Celtic reels on the fiddle. What unites this disparate collection is that Zawadzki serves, throughout, as the awestruck narrator of an extended hymn to nature. In The Woods, her magical realist poetry is accompanied by the haunting sound of a Korean taegŭm flute, while the title track is a lengthy meditation on the joys of spring (“that soulful chaotic season”), where her angular string phrases shine through the dense arrangements like patches of sunlight in a forest.
Also out this month
Penguin Café’s latest album Handfuls of Night (Erased Tapes) was inspired by their leader Arthur Jeffes’ journey to the Antarctic with Greenpeace and explores a very singular mood – simple, slow-moving melodies played over icy, ambient drones. Each works on its own terms but the LP lacks the slightly chaotic, junkyard minimalism that is the band’s USP.
The soundtrack for the film Joker (Watertower Music) is a fine showcase for Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. While not as formally innovative as her claustrophobic score to HBO’s Chernobyl (which cleverly manipulated ambient noises that she recorded in a derelict power plant), this terrifying collection works as unorthodox cello concerto, the growling cello set against Bollywood-style slurring violins and dissonant vocals.
Finally, Matthew Halsall – both as a bandleader and as the boss of the Gondwana record label – has long specialised in genteel recreations of Pharoah Sanders-style “spiritual jazz”. His latest album Oneness (Gondwana) refines these characteristics to the point that the clatter of jazz has almost been surgically removed, leaving just the “spiritual” signifiers – the swooping strings, the Alice Coltrane-ish harp flourishes, the sitars and tamboura drones – that rumble beneath Halsall’s stately trumpet solos. It works well as a piece of chamber music with almost vestigial, homeopathic traces of jazz.
