Paul Van Gysegem Quartet, Square Talks

 

What yearly developments new and serious music manages to achieve are not always the sort of thing you hear about in the mass media these days. This blog page tries to cover as big a swatch of what's new as possible. Today is no exception with a release worth hearing and consideration, namely the Belgian  New Free Jazz ensemble known as the Paul Van Gysegem Quintet and their live album  Square Talks (el Negocita Records eNR079, Bandcamp).

It is an absorbing, very successful effort from start to finish. All features a nicely adventurous Quintet of Paul Van Gysegem on double bass, Cel Overberghe on tenor and soprano sax, Patrick De Groote on trumpet and flugelhorn, Erik Vermeulen on piano, and Marek Patrman on drums and for one selection a second trumpet.

The open improvisational game plan is to listen to one another and create a mutually inventive set of interactions. This has passion but also a kind of free logic that rings true with nicely tempered contributions from all concerned. There is a specially lucid and thoroughgoing vision to this music that perhaps identifies it as European more so than not, surely in its vocabulary at any rate. At the same time it is not in any way a gratuitous or hasty sort of bundle so much as it is a very successful effort to thrive in a free improvisational state.

Listen and order here: https://elnegocito.bandcamp.com/album/square-talks

Recommended heartily. Not to be missed if you seek the new edges of jazz freedom.