Danish guitarist Jakob Bro is on top form with touring friends Thomas Morgan (double bass) and Joey Baron (drums) on this highly appealing six-track set recorded live at Jazz Standard, New York in July 2017.
The 40-year old Bro – what a great surname for jazz, eh? - and his two friends conjure sadness out of thin air on the beautiful opener, Mild. The thread continues on Red Hook, those reverby Frisellisms leading the trio to poetic heights, with echo and slight distortion used sparingly and to great effect.
What are these pieces all saying? Try and figure that one out and you will defeat yourself. Better lie back and ingest the soothing balm and wistful air of Copenhagen and know that music has its own codes and sinuous magic.
To even use the word 'jazz' seems erroneous. There are no actual songs on the record but one is almost swayed into writing about song. That highly sensitive and expressive guitar has the air of a lonely chorister and there is sometimes the air of a medieval hymn, perhaps a Danish one, attendant upon Bro’s approach.
This, of course, sounds utterly tendentious and any such comparisons would be difficult to argue convincingly in a musical academy. Yet there is something deep down in the fibres of the pieces that seems to look back, and not always in an that ethereal, quasi-religious fashion either.
Evening Song has the ethereal, transcendent element but on this record there is too the primal scree and alluvial deposits of earthly things. It can get heavy too, but sensuous heavy, not heavy metal-heavy by any means. Listen to the truly astonishing tour de force Dug, Bro pulling out the stops with odd hammer-ons and little self-executed sampling jolts, stings and squalls of sound. Meanwhile, his two cohorts in the engine room up the ante, turning the live set towards something that lurches along with narcotic power, a bit of Jimi Hendrix going on perhaps.
The friends work closely, listening and tripping off each other's sounds. They read each other well, they know when to go quiet and let Baron's whispering brushes do the work, or when to look for the exit sign and ease away in step into a quietly-marshalled departure. Thus they appear to pick their way gingerly, leaving a dimly-lit stage through a short gap of silence before the appreciative applause of the New York fans.
Check this one out, Bay of Rainbows is definitely one of the jazz albums of the year, a mesmeric affair of pieces from the heart.
