Borderlands Trio
Wandersphere
Intakt Records
★★★★★

There is irony in the title of the Borderlands Trio, for they embody the mainland of North America. Drummer Eric McPherson is a New Yorker, bassist Stephen Crump hails from Memphis and pianist Kris Davis is from Vancouver, growing up in Calgary.

Their new double album, Wandersphere, is a wondrous journey of sonic artistry with the musicians, in Davis’s words, giving themselves  “freedom to just really be in the moment.” She should know: she plays with a beautiful abandon while keeping as close as a musical sister to her two confreres.

Listen to their timbral unity on the opener, Super-Organism, as they push the frontiers of their collective passage. McPherson’s drumming anticipates and picks up every step of their way, while Crump’s dancing bass guides and earths their every move.

115 minutes here of the concord of unified sound, by a trio of dedicated and stellar musical insurgents.

Phil Hargreaves/Richard Harrison
Fall Through the Infinite
WHI Music
★★★★

PHIL HARGREAVES is a Liverpool saxophonist and bold improviser whose music evokes the voices and echoes of his home city. In his  new album, Fall Through the Infinite, he duets with the drummer of Spaceheads, Richard Harrison, and they create an urban soundscape, sometimes forlorn, sometimes bursting with hope, which is constantly inventive and multifaceted in its sonic patterns.

Hargreaves’s tenor horn rampages through Reach for the Tar in ardent conversation with Harrison’s scuttling percussive words,  and in Pool, it is his flute which breezes through the spaces of his partner’s sounds. In Tadpole, Let Me Kiss You, his flute picks out his notes as if he were plucking them from some pollution-swept tree.

The duo find modes of artistic heaven in Merseyside streets and in Constellations of Asphalt they express it with feelings which combine bleakness and love. A powerful album this, which explores a great city of manifold sounds.

Chris Laurence
Ken Wheeler: Some Gnu Ones
Jazz in Britain Records
★★★★

KENNY WHEELER, the Canadian musical genius who lived in Leytonstone, East London, was both innovative composer and brilliant trumpeter. Before he died in 2014, he left several compositions with his close friend, bassist Chris Laurence, which in the three-track album, Some Gnu Ones, are thankfully ours to hear.

Laurence plays with a deep, mollifying artistry with Frank Ricotti’s vibes and string quintet, particularly in the Piece for Double Bass and Low Strings, and Wheeler’s composing power shines from C-Man and Baroque Piece, where Tom Walsh’s flugelhorn and John Parricelli’s guitar share Kenny's translucent notes.

Brenda Goddard’s soulful portrait of Wheeler adorns the sleeve and the musical language of his presence is everywhere on the album, breathing melody, inventiveness and an intensity of sound which transverses all genres, forging a loving tribute to a transatlantic troubadour who made East London his home, and it resonates with beauty and human concord and harmony.