Bring Backs

Album review

As popular music continues to fragment into ever smaller sub genres, the semantics used to describe all these new tendrils is struggling to catch up. Of all the current musical hybrids, few are as fashionable as the hip hop-jazz melding (variously referred to Nu jazz, Neo soul or Downtempo), that has brought a wealth of new performers and new energies to the British jazz scene. Memorably described in The Guardian as having "a predilection for saxophone solos, Afrobeat, Dr. Martens and Dickies," these young players have brought new listeners to the normally staid jazz world. Alfa Mist, aka Alfa Sekitoleko has emerged as a leading creative force in this chill, maturing movement mixing hip hop, grime, and electronic early influences with a healthy respect and knowledge of jazz alloys of the past into his own Nu fusion. The prolific beat maker who dexterously weaves instrumental textures and time signatures, is also a self-taught keyboard player with the good taste to prefer the ringing rounded tones of the wondrous Fender Rhodes. On Bring Backs, his cool-toned soundshifting—what his official press release calls, "groove-based intricacies, lyrical solipsism and meandering fragmentations"—continues to refine and expand his improvisational vision. With Miles Davis's fusion work and soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer's epic cinematic statements are obvious and audible influences, Mist's jams feature his cadre of usual collaborators including guitarist Jamie Leeming, trumpeter Johnny Woodham, bassist Kaya Thomas-Dyke and drummer Jamie Houghton. Woodham uses a mute and wah-wah pedal effect to bring a distinct Miles flavor to "Coasting" and in "Mind the Gap," where Alfa and Lex Amor both rap over a gentle, swaying beat. (London tube announcements bookend the track.) In "Last Card (Bumper Cars)" Woodham returns to improvise with bass clarinetist Sam Rapley around a poem by Hilary Thomas who recites several stanzas before the tune breaks into this collection's most pronounced groove. Alfa, an effective if deadpan rapper himself, self-reflects on album closer "Organic Rust." Set against a loose drum beat and woozy guitar, he acknowledges: "It's fate, I'm just a battler, too black to be tatted up/ A hunter a gatherer, lunge if you're bad enough/ Been thrown downstairs, I clung to the bannister." © Robert Baird/Qobuz