JOSEPH SHABASON - Fellowship

The Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist and composer has also collaborated as a saxophonist with Diana and War on Drugs, alongside a solo career marked by a skillful fusion of landscape, ambient music and chamber jazz.

The dark, energetic developments of his debut album "Aytche" and the refined sophisti-pop insights shared with Nicholas Krgovich and Chris Harris on the underrated 2020 album "Philadelphia" (imagine a four-handed project between Paul Buchanan and Mark Hollis) have represented the two extremes of a sonic language in constant evolution, free of ideological constraints.

"The Fellowship" stays true to Shabason's non-dogmatic conception. The eight tracks are touching, restless mini-symphonies, eight instrumental pieces describing Shabason's complicated relationship with the Islamic faith his Jewish parents embraced shortly before his birth. The steady pulse of the bass and the harsh notes of the sax that shape the opening track, "Life With My Grandparents", are only slightly softened by a child's babbling, the only vocal element on an album that entrusts all of the emotional weight of its story to the music, where childhood fragments, set-aside memories and lived experience intertwine and alternate like fleeting flashbacks.

"The Fellowship" is an album rich in sonic alterations and clashing creative situations. Shabason bends the rules of chamber jazz, infecting the base material of one of the record's darkest, most experimental tracks, the exhausting noise-like catharsis of "Escape From North York", with electronics and dissonance; conversely, flute, vibraphone and guitar try to draw attention away from the seemingly airier, but actually damp and gloomy, harmonies of the title track.

The central triptych, on the other hand, has the task of shifting the narrative logic from extrinsic emotional states to more visceral, intimate passionate contexts: the evanescent new-age tones of "0-13", the cyclical ethno-world rhythms animating "13-15", the jazz twists and turns fueling the pathos of "15-19" leave many of the creative solutions suspended, almost as if to represent that conceptual limbo to which the many questions the musician poses as premises for this project are destined.

The two exuberant closing tracks are tasked with providing some answers, or rather some clues, since this time Shabason forgoes the use of recordings of voices and family members (a technique used back in the days of "Anne", the album dedicated to his mother). The solution is ambiguous, undefined: the artist moves from a riot of percussion and synths in the manner of Jon Hassell and David Sylvian on "Comparative World Religions" to a cinematic, quasi-orchestral romanticism reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto on "So Long". 

An interesting, unconventional experiment, Joseph Shabason's new album is not only conceptually intriguing but also musically stimulating. Touching on a multitude of styles, "Fellowship" slips into that undefined space between nu-jazz and new age, alternating predictability with creative leaps, in a swirl of sounds that seduces and enchants.