Nik Bärtsch: Entendre review | John Lewis’s contemporary album of the month

The Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch is many issues: a membership proprietor (he describes his Zurich venue Exil as a “self-perpetuating organism for creating experimental music”), an educational (he studied linguistics and philosophy and at the moment lectures on aesthetics) and a martial artist (with a black belt in aikido). For 20 years, he’s additionally been one of the greatest names on the European jazz circuit, however his music has at all times drawn from myriad sources – the spiky modernism of Bartók and Stravinsky, the polyrhythmic funk of bands like the Meters and proggy indie-rock bands comparable to Battles and Tortoise.

His two common lineups – the electrical quintet Ronin and the acoustic quartet Mobile – are fascinating, however might be laborious work. In a band state of affairs, Bärtsch’s tricksy compositions (often numbered items prefixed by the phrase “Modul”) are sometimes a headache-inducing mess of interlocking rhythms and clashing harmonies. But, when rearranged for solo piano, they’ve room to breathe, which is why Entendre – his first album fully performed on solo acoustic piano, with no overdubs – is likely to be his most interesting but.

On the 2004 album Rea, Modul 26 was a unlovable prog-rock groove in the disorientating time signature of 7/8; right here, it’s remodeled right into a glittering piece of minimalism through which he improvises over a mechanical ostinato lefthand riff, like a harmonically adventurous Philip Glass enjoying boogie-woogie. Likewise, on the 2010 album Llyrìa, Modul 55 descends into dreary Japanese jazz-rock: the piano model is a way more participating and meditative development that efficiently reinterprets the shakuhachi flute solo and lingers, deliciously, over a repeated riff. Modul 58_12 melds two outdated items into an eight-minute epic that channels Bärtsch’s love of Steve Reich. He additionally revisits his fascination with Balkan folks melodies, and harks again to his roots as a drummer: Modul 5 sees him drumming on a single observe for 3 minutes, exploring its a number of harmonics, earlier than remodeling these hammered rhythms right into a prolonged, phase-shifting piece. For anybody who can often solely tolerate Bärtsch in small doses, that is one LP that deserves repeated listening.

Also out this month

Potential Landscapes is the debut LP by New York-based composer and bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause, that includes 4 drone-based items with varied friends. The most compelling is the heavenly From Thin Air, the place the multitracked, overlapping hums of singer Elisa Bragg are accompanied by bowed bass. Cellist Patrick Belaga has labored with a spread of R&B artists and soundtracked Lady Gaga’s 2017 documentary movie: his debut album Blutt is a sequence of drumless, ambient instrumentals that make a dream-like suite from shimmering synths, echo-laden pianos, woozy strings and wordless vocals. Claire Rousay’s A Softer Focus is a collaboration with visible artist Dani Toral that mixes obsessive discipline recordings, clanking typewriter sounds and pitch-shifted, harmonised conversations with string and piano preparations: sporadically, they achieve remodeling mundane soundscapes into one thing epic and transcendent.