Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Nicola Miller - Living Things [Cacophonous Revival Recordings 025]

Put out on the circuit via the American imprint that is Cacophonous Revival Recordings as their cat.no. 025 on December 13th, 2k24 is "Living Things", the most recent album outing cooked up and conceived by Canadian saxophone player x composer Nicola Miller. Alongside a hand-picked and tightly knit group of friends and fellow musicians including names like Nike Fraser and Frank Gratkowski amongst others Nicola Miller envisions a deep and distinctly personal take on Jazz as a genre, opening with the slow, droning and klaxon'esque, yet highly detailed nocturnal DarkJazz of "Barge" and its seemingly random, yet carefully placed metallic percussion backings subsequently followed by the rather playful, tongue-in-cheek and swinging "Night Crawlers" which presents a new angle applied to a, originally, rather traditional Jazz approach before, over its rather extended runtime, fully fragmenting and falling apart in a controlled improvisational environment. Furthermore we see pieces like "Bufflehead" indulging in almost tragic, overly exaggerated melancholia, reminding us of great drama and vintage monochrome movies from the days of yore whereas the title track "Living Things" might be the one closest to what most uninitiated ppl refer to as classic Jazz on this album despite its slighty twisted nature and complex uptempo sequences whereas "Seagulls" turns into a slightly mischievious excursion into rather funky, slightly Future Tribal-infused polyrhythms accompanied by yearning, sustained and off-kilter eruptions just to name a few. One album for the dedicated Jazz aficionados out there.

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