Award-winning Swiss Drummer Florian Arbenz Forces Hard and Soft Conversations
‘Elemental,’ fifth in a 12-album, 12-lineup series
Award-winning Swiss drummer Florian Arbenz’s fifth jazz conversation, elemental, feels fresh and primordial, yet familiar and nostalgic — as if you’ve been here before (but experiencing everything for the first time), ensconced in your favorite spot in the corner table, with your matcha latte and your blueberry scone…watching the world go by, content just to be in it.
Awash in the musical equivalent of blues and greys, lightly frosted at the edges, traipsing through universal timelines, tenors, and tinctures of the past with the present, set against a cast of multi-cultural characters in quietly syncopated bloom.
Here, a touch of Portuguese accordionist Joāo Barradas and Dutch saxophonist Tineke Postma’s gypsy jazz, taking on double-duty for the string convergence of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli’s 1930s-‘40s Hot Club, as the lovely “Luna Volver” enraptures and unravels a blissful entanglement of lovers in fond, bittersweet remembrance.
It’s one long, reluctant goodbye in the scrapbook of our lives; it’s personal.
Conversation #5 — elemental features a rainbow contingent: Arbenz winding his sharp and replete percussives, leading and responding with Postma, Barradas, and Swiss-Australian bassist Rafael Jerjen, each making a difference in this collaborative, nine-track, April 29, 2022 release.
Arbenz wants to record 12 albums with 12 line-ups in his Basel studio. He’s well on his way with this arresting tableau.
Elemental stands out from the others.
Every instrument sings, a harbinger of its uniquely gifted guest host. Clearer. Stronger. Distinctive and vast, singular and resonant, from the knit of metallic to silk strings underplayed to great effect on the breathtakingly subatomic instrumental, “The Passage of Light,” by bassist Jerjen and accordionist Barradas.
They pick at the clerical-ballet of disparate melody clean, soft, and true, scientists operating on a musical melancholy high from the last live performance, before there were no more, ages ago.
Unique doesn’t begin to describe the serendipitous alchemy. Of this recording’s line-up, Arbenz says, “it doesn't happen so often that I immediately get captured by a musician by just hearing him/her on a record. And I think this is a big link for me to Tineke, Joāo and Rafael.”
The link is loose and wavy, and somehow cohesive, even on abstractions that stretch the limits of imagination and the definition of a song, as on the last track, “Freedom Jazz Fugue.”
Barradas’ accordion softens every hard edge, while adding incredible dichotomy of whimsy and classical eloquence. Arbenz is heard whipping the whimsical, classical display into a controlled frenzy — the insistent jazz voice calling out for more.
“Sin Tar-Danza” signals the good, wacky times ahead, as Arbenz sets up a topsy-turvy rhythm for the quartet to go crazy over. But not too crazy as to lose the taffy flavor of staggered, condensed, brilliantly loopy jazz.
In the early morning hours of “Small Talk,” Barradas sounds like he’s heavy breathing/hyperventilating through accordion bellows, after Arbenz leaves a vague flutter of a primeval soundtrack mimicking dinosaur tracks. A brief, Morse Code warmup into the unknown and unknowable.
“Reverie” clashes and croons in the eye of the storm, spitting gunfire and fragmented, déjà-vu remorse. More subtitle sound effects — the brooding detective walking off his fifth hangover in a dystopian Paris — than something you can hold onto.
“Waking With a Start” begins to take on the familiar jazz hustle and bustle (Arbenz on parade, borrowing and burrowing with the best), strengthening content over character, substance over style in a merging of quicksilver sound, time, and a specific place to be. Sax and accordion engage in oddly pleasant, harmonious tug of war, with bassist Jerjen pulling at loose threads.
The fourth track sniffles and snores through a racy combine of the dissimilar and the refrain, underscored by a drummer determined to fuse the two.
Arbenz muscles in “Shooting the Breeze,” scalloping the edges for a hustling, breakdance groove for the accordionist and saxophonist to meander through, in between the cues, rather than dead on the nose. He also indulges in his own netless, ingratiating drum solo, a flurry of sticks and encaustic leads, as modern as the accordion is ancient.
“Prelude” lasts about two minutes, 12 seconds, ushering in a dark mood, apt for a what-the-hell finale. In rippling, growling, creaking tides, the musicians converge and separate, then back again, until you can’t tell who is who, and that is the whole point of Florian Arbenz’s 12-album conversation.