Download or listen to the best albums and artists of Moderne jazz

There was The Beatles by The Beatles, The Stooges by The Stooges, Cypress Hill by Cypress Hill, Metallica by Metallica – the list goes on. Naming an album after yourself tends to signal either the first chapter of your music, or the final one. For GoGo Penguin this album represents the latter as a brief decade of enchanting musical exploration draws to a close for pianist Chris Illingworth, drummer Rob Turner and bassist Nick Blacka. The Manchester trio had established their own unique style and their well-balanced blend of contemporary jazz, electronic music and minimalism is captured perfectly in this 2020 vintage. With an album like this, GoGo Penguin increasingly move away from the legacy left behind by EST (the defunct Esbjörn Svensson Trio), the masters of minimalism (Steve Reich, Philip Glass) and of electronic music (Aphex Twin, Roni Size) who were their main influences in their early days. Illingworth explains, “What I’ve been able to do on the piano – it’s the sort of thing I’ve been trying to get towards, in what I can physically play and what I can do to express who I am. And I know that the other guys take the same pride themselves in what they’ve contributed. We’ve all found our place, we’ve all got that confidence of being able to say, ‘This is how I want to play my instrument, and this is how we want to play as a band – that thing we’ve always been aiming for”. For the first time, GoGo Penguin took their time to make this album and spent six months writing and two weeks recording and experimenting. It was a relatively calm experience but also emotional, as Turner explains, “This time, there's a lot more facing the realities of becoming older, facing mortality, and watching people that you care about being very close to death. At the same time, Chris (Illingworth) became a dad. The longer you live, the more complicated your reality becomes, so we felt our music had to reflect that”. And this is reflected in the improvisations as well as the ambient lyrical flights in GoGo Penguin, inflected with deep emotional resonance. In F Maj Pixie, the power behind Nick Blacka’s bassline acts like the beating heart of the track. Overall, this fifth studio album is all about emotion and delicate melodies. The clean production is free of unnecessary flourishes and GoGo Penguin get straight to the point in GoGo Penguin. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz