NAKAMA - New World

Christian Meaas Svendsen formed the band Nakama in 2015 with the release of the album “Before The Storm”. Since then, five more works under the Nakama name have followed, including “Rituals” from 2019, an ambitious project in which free jazz wedded chamber music. Today the group is a quintet which, besides bassist Svendsen, includes saxophonist Klaus Ellerhusen Holm (Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit, Ballrog and a thousand other collaborations), clarinetist Andreas Hoem Røysum, drummer Andreas Mannila Wildhagen (Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit) and the Japanese pianist Ayumi Tanaka.

It is precisely the latter who gives the music of Nakama its most distinctive trait, with melodies that seem borrowed from the folk music of her homeland. The sound of the Norwegian band is a constant search for balance between the free impulses of the improvisers and the melodies that inspire them. Svendsen's music is light years away from the nocturnal, atmospheric Nordic jazz of many of his compatriots. Rather, the five musicians seem to have grown up at the source of the free jazz of Chicago's AACM.

On the album's opening track, “Æ-b”, the musicians tread lightly, defining the coordinates of the sonic space. Later, on the first part of “L-e”, Klaus Ellerhusen Holm and Andreas Hoem Røysum chase each other on clarinet before finding a slow choral unity with the other musicians in the track's long closing section (a spiritual worthy of the most inspired David Murray).

The funk soul of Christian Meaas Svendsen ignites the groove of “Benign”, preceded by a long double bass improvisation. After the obsessive, solipsistic long digression of the eponymous “New World”, the five musicians return to dialogue on the elegant finale of “Hosono”.

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24/06/2022