Crinklechips
It takes something unconventional to remind me of the excitement I felt when I first discovered truly great music.
This album is chaotic, strange and wonderful. It wont be everyone’s idea of a good time but I love it when, musically speaking I have no idea what’s going to happen next. Maca Conu provides that bizarre uncertainty for me in spades whilst also providing a central core of familiar Jazz musicality.
So if experimental Jazz is your thing I highly recommend this unconventional gem!
Maca Conu is the dazzling new band led by Belgian-born, Oslo-residing pianist, composer and improviser Jonas Cambien, an outfit whose eponymous new release clamours like an exploding kunstkammer of curiosities, where runaway orchestrinas and impish automata cavort and gambol in gloriously frisky frissons.
With its origins in a commission for the 2021 edition of Norway’s Motvind festival, the album also heralds the recorded debut of a starry Scandinavian ensemble, featuring Cambien’s long-time associate, drummer Andreas Wildhagen, low-end powerhouse, double-bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flatan and Danish rising-star saxophonist Signe Emmeluth. Joining forces on Maca Conu, this mighty quartet draw upon combined experiences performing alongside notables including Bugge Wesseltoft, Mats Gustafsson, Tony Buck and Paal Nilssen-Love, while also developing fecund alliances forged in such units as Gard Nilssen’s Supersonic Orchestra, Jonas Cambien Trio and Emmeluth’s Amoeba, to decipher their bandleader’s combustible glossary, spiking it with feverish chicanery and oodles of candid charm, communicating in hive-mind mode across uncharted cross-sections straddling contemporary composition and free-improvisation.
Skittishly animated cuts such as ‘A Terrible Misunderstanding’, ‘Blue Eyed Pleco’ and ‘The Lesser Evil’ whistle, puff and pulse in a simulacra of bizarre semi-organic machinery, rendering bonus layers of esoteric, abstract mystery with every listen. ‘One Low Now High’ encloses a warbling cameo by guest trombonist Guro Kvåle in the swirling psychedelics of Cambien’s haunting organ whirl, creeping out like a Wurlitzer-raving spook from Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, while ‘Question the Answer’ finds the core foursome plotting another signature paradox, as meditative, all-enveloping drone stealthily evolves into frenzied arcade machine ruckus.
Maca Conu works like a grand hall of mirrors, distorting the surface of initial contact, altering deeply ingrained assumptions and conventions, continually altering appearances so that nothing is as it first appears. It is a magnificent, yet lasting, illusion.
credits
released January 26, 2024
Signe Emmeluth alto and tenor saxophones
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten double bass (Minimoog on 'Pseudoscience')
Andreas Wildhagen drums
Jonas Cambien piano and Ace Tone Top 5 organ (soprano saxophone on 'Pseudoscience')
Guest: Guro Kvåle trombone on 'Once Low Now High' and 'Good Frenemy'
All compositions by Jonas Cambien
Recorded by Dag Erik Johansen at Athletic Sound, Halden, Norway | Mixed and mastered by Lasse Marhaug
Produced by Jonas Cambien | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos
I'm really not the fan of live albums, but this pearl is a must listen. It lasts over an hour, but there is not even one minute of boredom or tiredness in here Gremlin Monroe
Simply amazing to hear a new album with Wadada and Ewart!! ...And Reed rounds out this trio beautifully.
Just gave it my first spin. Absolutely magical. jeffrey maurer
Jazz bassist Nim Sadot pays homage to the life of his his late grandfather, a Polish artist who escaped a Soviet labor camp. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 1, 2022
Trumpeter Harry Spencer’s orchestral modern jazz has cinematic scope, inspired here by dissidents throughout history. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 3, 2023
Listening to this again today and it's terrific. This is different from most solo saxophone albums in a good way. Great melodic lines played with Tim's unique dark alto sound. Really like the track Curls. torzano