A(nother) lovely review from Italy! Thank you Gianfranco Marmoro at OndaRock.
Google translate says:
Eclectic musician graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, Tamar Osborn is the leader and saxophonist of Collocutor, a band with which he has won over critics and audiences, thanks to a modal jazz with refined afrobeat nuances, fueled by a 70s jazz spirituality as well as contamination with polyphonic choral music and Indian classical music.
For the third album “Continuation”, Osborn pauses the complete formation of nine elements. With two percussionists (Magnus Mehta and Afla Sackey) and the trumpeter (Simon Finch) outside the ensemble, the instrumental set-up becomes more suffused, suspended. A creative situation that for the artist wants to depict the various emotional states that causes the pain of loss, of mourning.
There are only six tracks that follow a creative path that from peace and reflection (“Deep Peace”) evolves towards an anxiety-inducing state, cultivated by slight instrumental and thematic changes (“Continuation”), before the contamination of the rhythm releases a spiritual trance afro-jazz (“Pause”) which deflagrates (“The Angry One”) and then returns to the ranks (“Lost And Found”, “Pause Reprise”).
Exemplary the implementation by the band, between string sounds recorded in a Baptist church in London that offer ample breathing space to the initial track “Deep Peace”, Tibetan percussions that introduce a dialogue between wind instruments (Josephine Davies, and Tamar Osborn), to then celebrate a party of sounds with infinite details (guitar, bass, flute, sax, percussion and polyphonic voices) in the alchemical title track, reaching a first expressive ecstasy in the hypnotic “Pause”, where electronics, drone live together music and guitar solo and sax now ramshackle now more dense.
At this point it seems necessary to briefly present the other protagonists, namely the aforementioned saxophonist Mike Lesirge (Django Bates, Billy Cobham, Erykah Badu, Phoenix City All-Stars, Hackney Colliery Band), the blues guitarist Marco Piccioni (Julia Biel, Cleveland Watkiss, Lekan Babalola and Kate Luxmoore), bassist Suman Joshi (from the versatile curriculum that includes the Dele Sosimi Afrobeat Orchestra, the jazz-punk band The Destroyers, the folk-jazz of Trio Manouche and the Reggae Ska of Maroon Town), l other saxophonist Josephine Davies (Jamie Cullum, the Bbc Band, and Ronnie Scott’s Vanguard Band) and the only drummer left in the game for this record chapter, Maurizio Ravalico (Jamiroquai, Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Greg Osby, Kaidi Tatham, Dego McFarland, Finn Peters, Shabaka Huchkins).
With this varied technical and stylistic axis, the cocktail of funk, jazz, punk, ethnic and improvisation in an alt-rock key of the scratchy “The Angry One” resonates as a deflagrating expression of all the creative peculiarities of the group, a crazy piece of that which is in all respects a real suite in a jazz key.
The subsequent “Lost And Found” is therefore the apogee, the alchemical result of a research that is both interior and carnal, a minimal sound nemesis punctuated by a scratchy sax solo and the soothing touch of the flute.
And do not deceive the title “Pause Reprise”, the apparent return to meditation and solitude of the first good ones does not have the same taste nor the same sound representation. Something has happened in these thirty-nine minutes, the tension has taken possession of peace and the matter has become incandescent, despite its manifest calm.
The new Collocutor album is an artistic experience that leaves its mark and which will hardly migrate from the listener’s imagination. “Continuation” is one of those records destined to occupy your dreams: after listening to it, the music will never seem the same again
COLLOCUTOR 