This month I had much less time to listen to new music (musical duties, trips and a lot of work) than usual. For this reason, I come with a single suggestion about new music released in March, that anyway allows me to tackle a slightly broader topic, in which I am very interested (as my readers probably know): contemporary jazz music. For this reason, this monthly Round-Up is quite different from the usual, being structured as a sort of digression on the work of a single artist. Anyway, to proceed with order, let’s say that this month’s musical advice is to take a listen to Breath, a single released by Latvian-born, Amsterdam-based singer, pianist and songwriter Liva Dumpe. This allows us to take a small step back to talk about Dumpe’s first solo work, released last year.
“When I’m home in the countryside of Latvia, I partake in a nightly ritual of mine, where I grab my grandfather’s monocular and go observe the wildlife of the Baltics. After one of these expeditions, I wrote a song called “Tālskatis” (Monocular) which captures the stillness of the nature. In this album, the monocular symbolises the ambition to see further into the unknown; though it’s also still an object to hide behind.”
(Liva Dumpe, on her bandcamp page)
I don’t exactly remember how I came across Live Dumpe’s music in the past few months. I guess it has something to do with her involvement as a lead and backup singer with the Metropole Orkest, but I’m not sure. Anyway, in addition to lending his voice to the Orkest and beside working as lead singer within different quintet and sextet formations, Dumpe has recently released her first LP, Tālskatis (out on June 21, 2024). The album, self-produced and self-distributed, is a marvelous blend of jazz inflections, vocal jazz and traditional sounds: Dumpe, engaged on the piano as well as the voice, provides a perfect harmonic substrate for jazzy guitar arpeggios having almost spectral dream-pop vibes (guitars are played by Italian guitarist Massimo Imperatore, born in Napoli but based in Amsterdam since 2017); the guitars meet discreet, deeply jazzy drums (Ilia Rayskin), while the double bass (played by Omer Govreen) builds a delicate but constant pulse, and the flutes (played by Ketija Ringa-Karahona) come to complete the sound spectrum. Tālskatis appears as a successful mix between jazz experimentation, vocal research and the catchiness of pop (although a “stripped down” pop, like it is desertified, reduced to the essence): the compositions it contains (all the songs are written dy Dumpe over a period of almost 4 years) are often quite long, and leave wide space to the improvisation, as a final proof of the essential jazz nature of the entire operation. The title-track shows more traditional-vibes, probably also due to the lyrics (sung in what I suppose is Latvian language), but episodes like Compromises with its schizophrenic oscillations between avant-garde, funk-paced pop and jazz delicacy, or Hidden Storm, with its intricate network of rhythmic figures and its almost ambient final section, can be useful to give an idea of the variety of registers addressed by Dumpe and her band on the album. Sonata No. 1 in G major, an instrumental piece involving only piano, flute and some ethereal choirs by Dumpe, touches classical music’s territories, while the three connected movements of Fight Mini-Symphony (I. Inner Child Fight, II. Watching and III. Fight Dance) paint a large fresco about the expressive potential of this music: while movement one (Inner Child Fight) is essentially a rhythmic passage, obsessive and dark, featuring some mesmerizing vocal impros, movement two (Watching), living up to its title, seems to take a step back and it is a crooked ballad, slow and fascinating (I stand still, my heart will break my bones for running away./ They say: “Stay afar, your heart won’t criple your wings for hiding away.”), featuring a beautiful double bass solo phrasing and some serious Esperanza Spalding vibes in the use of vocal harmonies (some passages of this piece reminded me of Spalding’s recent album, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, and I wondered if Dumpe considers the work of the American double bass player and composer as a possible source of inspiration); the third movement, Fight Dance, returns to the rhythm to put together a sort of funny funk-jazz, with a lot of rhythmic deviations and digressions and an extensive and imaginative use of vocalese (Dumpe’s phrasing at times almost seems to chase the guitar arpeggios). Cocktail Song is a slow-motion, almost lame ballad, with very short lyrics and a fascinating instrumental section, with vocals in great evidence, featuring another beautiful solo phrasing by Govreen on his double bass and a haunting final drum solo which suddenly raise the pace. Roisin Rondo, the closing track, is almost a real cocktail song, which starts as a high-speed jazz to indulge into extremely reflective and romantic passages, going from Latin rhythms to black music, a sort of jukebox that in the rapid span of less than two minutes passes through a kaleidoscope of musical universes that are also very different from each other. Tālskatis is an album that has the potential to please both jazz enthusiasts (with his personal declination of jazz, often hybridized with popular and traditional music) and those who seek original, experimental music, which knows how to overcome the increasingly narrower limits of what we usually consider easy-listening, commercial pop, at the same time delivering new worlds to explore for listeners who dare to let themselves be transported by this music. It sounds new, experimental and audacious, typical features that are often found in very different albums which belong to the vast expanding universe of jazz music, another proof of vitality from our most cultured and most popular music (we should probably stop believing that these two things has to be in contradiction).
But, after this very long digression and coming back to the main topic of this (supposedly) brief review, we were talking about the most recent single licensed by Dumpe, Breath. Out on March 28, Breath is a composition for solo voice. The song testifies Dumpe’s research on the topic of extended vocal techniques, and particularly the practice of inhalation singing. The use of lyric-free improvisation makes of Breath a fragile and precious episode, almost like hanging on a trapeze without a safety net. Beyond the extraordinary mastery of vocal technique, Breath puts us in front of an artist who is not afraid to show herself stripped of defenses, in its fragility and complete honesty. Even though I’ve had little time to listen to new music in the past month, I’m extremely happy to have dedicated it to the work of Liva Dumpe, an artist who (I hope) we will soon hear much more about than we do today. Take a listen to Breath and to Tālskatis and you won’t be disappointed.