Last year, by a series of coincidences, I came across the second studio album by the english combo Archipelago, a trio dedicated to a profound reformulation and hybridization of jazz with rock, folk and electronic music. The trio features Faye MacCalman (vocals, sax, clarinet), Christian Alderson (drums) and John Pope (electric bass and double bass). After listening to Echoes To The Sky (click here and here to read my reviews wrote at that time, respectively in English and in Italian), I started following the work by these artists, and mainly by John Pope. I found that Pope was a very talented improviser, a creative composer and an instrumentalist of excellent qualities, with an absolutely personal voice on the instrument, and un uncommon expressiveness: as a fellow bass and double bass player, all these characteristics caught my attention, and I immediately begun to listen as much as I could of Pope’s works. Pope is a very active jazz musician in the Newcastle and London scene, as much as his bandmates in Archipelago, being involved in several different projects ranging from groups devoted to improvisation to the above mentioned trio and to an interesting jazz duo with violinist John Garner (I talked about it briefly here). But Pope is also the leader of his own quintet, the John Pope Quintet, which besides the Newcastle-upon-Tyne-based musician, here playing only the double bass (and percussions), features also Jamie Stockbridge on Alto and Baritone Saxophones, Graham Hardy on Trumpet and Flugelhorn, Johnny Hunter on Drums and Glockenspiel and his gorgeous Archipelago bandmate Faye MacCalman on Tenor Saxophone and Clarinet.
Just today the quintet released their second album, Citrinitas, which follows the debut act Mixed with Glass (2021). The album, released on the New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings label, takes its name from the mysterious process of alchemical yellowing, one of the major stages of the Magnus Opus: it may be referred, in alchemical philosophy, to the dawning of the solar light inherent to one’s being, or, into the psychoanalytical terms used by Carl Gustav Jung, to the to the wisdom that follows enlightenment and it is generally the fruit of advancing age. Here, in fact, the term paints the curious and cryptic artwork of the album yellow, and seems to allude to the enlightenment that could be one of the founding moments of jazz improvisation: not surprisingly, Citrinitas is a sort of long speech around improvisation as an expressive modality (it’s not a case that Pope defines himself as an open-hearted improviser), a musical journey that starts from free jazz touching concrete music and be-bop, contemporaneity and the more experimental sound research. As you may argue, it is needed some degree of alchemy for a good improvisation, and this means putting people together, let them work on each other and refine their interplay (a lesson that comes from afar, and that jazz enthusiasts have known since the works and the approach of a giant like Miles Davis): and thus Citrinitas also testifies to a music intended as a place of meeting and communion, an action that is carried out together with others, and which is well represented in the documentary Stepping into the Stream, filmed during performance for the album sessions in front of a live audience in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on April 18 this year (a short fragment of which you can see at the end of this text ).
The album opens on the first single, Free Spin: the drums sets the tempo and a double bass groovy line accompanies the theme exposed by the trumpet. The song shows what will be a paradigm of this entire work, an overall mood swinging from meditative passages to furious improvisations, alternating dense orchestral moments to minimalist-like ones. Along a series of suspensions and burning restarts, Free Spin creates a small and very modern free-jazz odyssey in which each instrument (and each instrumentalist) is both a vehicle of melody and a rhythmic mechanism, helping to build a puzzle game which, as a whole, takes the form of a furious crescendo which ends in the leader’s double bass and the saxes and trumpet engaging in an authentic dialogue while exposing the theme as a conclusion. The following track, Through the Earth, begins with an enigmatic and beautiful bass intro and develops into a sort of symphony for saxophones: a ferocious walking bass sustains the soloists, and a variety of different moods follow one another in the improvised sections. Hardy’s solo is particularly effective, built upon a very strong tension created by the leader’s double bass, accompanied only by the discreet brushing of the drums: the solo section moves towards the finale in an authentically free progression, where the collective sound becomes enormous and extremely exciting. On Shadow Work, the saxes and bass both add rhythmic sustain to the theme, played on the trumpet; pretty soon the piece turns into some of an enchanted sabbath, with saxes wandering all along the stereophonic front creating a sort of a free-jazz section. In the real middle of the song, all becomes quiet and the piece take some kind of a concrete/atmospheric turn, where noises surges to music such as real notes. I see Shadow Work as a treatise on the expressive potential of the medium. The deconstruction of the logical space of a song explodes into chaotic pieno sections, a final coda that alternates moments of fullness with moments of silence. A procession of Heads is an obscure march led by a punctuated bass, with saxes which threateningly circles around the theme like vultures. The sound grows progressively as the song proceeds, playing with silence as much as with notes. Solo sections are fragmented and deeply fascinating, as hoarse and desperate as they are dense and full of colours. Pope uses a bow in the middle section of the song, engaging into a wonderful, mysterious solo, full of nuances. In the final part, the song comes back to the idea of a march, but displaying a much lighter, less minacious mood. World Dancer has almost Parker(ish) accents in the theme exposition, and then evolve towards a joyful, fascinating free-like implosion beyond of all the boundaries. In some way, it is both a be-bop fantasy impromptu and a free form digression into unknown territories: along the way the soloists seem to reconnect on the same ground, sometimes, such as it happens in the constructive/destructive interference phenomena. When the contributions add up, the song reveals a bop character, and this happens in all the more linear and melodic passages; when the interference is “destructive” (it’s just a metaphor, of course), the music takes a darker shade, and turns into an exploration of unexpected, mysterious places. It is a wonderful and deeply seductive moment. Hiba sets on a joyous rhythmic figure, with some exotic vibes: the wind instruments outline the theme over the rhythmic progress of the bass and drums, and the solo sections are long, elaborate and profoundly vibrant. Here the bass solo by Pope is mesmerizingly beautiful, almost haunting in its spiral-like progression, like a long fall accompanied by many slides on the strings, before coming back to the rhythmic pattern which underlined the first section and that sustains also the gorgeous, gloomy clarinet solo by Faye MacCalman. The sound becomes more massive in the final coda of the piece, on which the theme is exposed again. Quantum Stepper is another experiment on the boundaries of the song form: concrete sounds combine to create a rhythmic carpet on which the bass is responsible for building a real progression, punctuated by the interventions of the wind instruments, just like each musician is looking for a proper direction. Like jumping from one step of a ladder to another, the song grows from free-form improvisations towards a massive, chaotic wall of sound, where the most important part is the interplay between the musicians. Citrinitas ends in Shiryo, a nocturnal jazz ballad led by a scratchy saxophone which has the gait of a march but soon turns into a tight pace sustained by robust basses and syncopated drums. The winds interventions are again inserted into some kind of well-shaped, organized chaos, creating free-jazz waves which break the dark ocean designed by the rhythm section. Stockbridge alto sax solo is a powerful passage of imaginative, dense phrasing, underlined by the silence of all the other instruments. As the drums and bass come back into the song, the solo slowly ends in a ferocious rhythm crescendo which paves the way to the return of trumpet and tenor saxophone into the scene, before the song fades into a sort of twilight silence that marks the conclusion of this journey.
Citrinitas shows a band in a state of grace: a collective of courageous and reckless improvisers engaging in a multi-voiced dialogue, trying to push the boundaries a little step further. In these eight tracks, John Pope and his musician work to transform and deform the harmonic structures, trying to gain new ground and to develop their free musical expression. The harmonic and melodic vocabulary of the soloists is extremely broad and varied, and every improvised section is always thrilling and exciting: the phrasing by Jamie Stockbridge, Graham Hardy and Faye MacCalman is always imaginative, inventive and full of ideas, and it is supported by the solidity of the Pope/ Hunter rhythm section. John Pope, as well, confirms himself as a very talented musician and composer, an exciting improviser with an uncommon feel on the instrument, capable of accompanying in a solid, orderly and enthralling way as well as producing phrasings and solo passages that are always of the highest level. There is a huge risk in working with such highly improvised materials (and premises), that is, losing control of the writing and the structures, being swallowed up by what becomes a vain soliloquy. This is a risk that pertains to the very concept of improvisation, as it is understood in jazz: free melodic expression of human feelings. It takes enormous control of one’s expressive sphere to be able to translate into musical language what stirs within each of us, and above all it takes enormous discipline to be able to do it effectively, and it is probably this severity that distinguishes the best musicians from everyone else (let’s just think about Sonny Rollins playing along the streets and bridges in New York, in the midst of the chaotic traffic of the big city, searching for the right notes; or also the depth of reflections which led John Coltrane to his own voice on the instrument, or again to the importance of transcendence and the practice of meditation as it was suggested by the great Gary Peacock; but the list of these kind of examples is endless). John Pope and his quintet take this risk with these compositions, and they come out victorious: Citrinitas is a vibrant journey into the actual alchemy that lies behind the jazz improvisation, a multicolored-shaded fresco about human interaction and musical interplay, a work of art which reconcile with the very concept of free self-expression. Just simply clear your mind and face this path, you will have no way of regretting it.