WITHIN & WITHOUT
(Earshift)
7/10
Jeremy Rose isn’t going to die wondering what might have happened had he more thoroughly documented his work. After last year’s epic Iron in the Blood came a supple, slinky collaboration between the Vampires (a band he co-leads) and guitarist Lionel Loueke, and now we have this quintet offering with another brilliant US guitarist, Kurt Rosenwinkel. Rose (alto saxophone, bass clarinet) and pianist Jackson Harrison (both from Sydney) recorded it in Berlin with Rosenwinkel, bassist Andreas Lang and drummer Tobias Backhaus.
Immediately striking is Rose’s alto sound: light, singing and organic, it could be some feathered friend soaring and swooping, its habitat being a tangle of chords and instruments rather than a tree. The bird analogy is not to imply any abstraction, however. Rose’s compositions are ruthlessly crafted affairs, with sufficient variety to bring out different aspects of everyone’s playing. Lang and Backhaus sound like an established rhythm section used to shadowing each other’s every move, and meanwhile Harrison finds scope to spice his pretty lines with angularity, and Rosenwinkel can double horn lines, thicken moods or produce exhilarating, skating solos.