There Is a Place

Album review

With Maisha, you don’t even need to get up to go travelling. Halfway between jazz-fusion and afrobeat, this ambitious project filled with mystery is led by drummer Jake Long. An exploration of atypical worlds as well as dreamlike and exotic atmospheres, There Is A Place brings together no less than six (excluding Long) musicians acting as tour guides: Amané Suganami (keyboards), Twm Dylan (double bass), Tim Doyle and Yahael Camara-Onono (percussions), Shirley Tetteh (guitar) and Nubya Garcia (flute and saxophone). Announced in the opening of We Out Here, a compilation released in February 2018 focused on the buzzing and young London jazz scene (a Qobuzism album!), Maisha show the depth of their musical ability here. And when the Londoners have run out of real places to inspire their music, they simply make them up, switching to spiritual jazz.

Maisha carry an intense cultural heritage. Inspired for the most part by prominent figures such as Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and the Coltrane couple (John and Alice), this album turns into a passionate homage, oscillating between airy melodies and pimped-up rhythms. With a splash of surf music and reggae as well as jazz guitars that dive into oriental sounds, the septet offers an intimate immersion into their secret garden. Quite fitting, as the album’s title is a direct reference to a small park where Jake Long likes retreating to. Five tracks − one of which hits the eleven minute mark – to paint five different landscapes. Progressive trance on Osiris with tribal tom-toms, flute melodies for the Zen atmosphere of a Japanese garden on Azure, and even investigative jazz that would be perfect for a detective-film soundtrack on Kaa: the panoramas keep flying by. A promising first album worth listening to on repeat for an endless stream of new imagery. © Clara Bismuth/Qobuz