Watermelon Sun

Album review

With his Hello Skinny project, Tom Skinner performs magic. A drummer in Shabaka Hutchings’ band, Sons Of Kemet, the Brit indeed manages to resurrect the outlandish spirit of the New York Underground of the 70s, when disco, hip-hop, soul, punk, post-punk and avant-garde were crashing into one another. Taken by AIDS in 1992, the extraterrestrial cellist Arthur Russell was one of the great gurus of this blend both improbable and awesome. A hardly gratuitous influence since Skinner has summoned for this Watermelon Sun, Hello Skinny’s second album, the avant-garde trombonist Peter Zummo, who notably played on a great number of Russell’s recordings, among which we find Kiss Me Again and Go Bang. It’s a copious mille-feuille mixing jazz, dub, repetitive music, house, footwork and world, in a dreamy and padded atmosphere that's sometimes even rather languorous. We find a trombone, some freaky keyboards, some saxophone and obviously percussion… You just have to let yourself get carried away through the twists and turns of these falsely nonchalant improvisations. All of this in sound landscapes as only the new British jazz scene knows how to create… © MZ/Qobuz