NOT MY LOVER
(Wave)
7/10
This is album is in part Chris Cody’s reflections on Paris, the city in which he lived for many years before returning to Sydney. Most overtly he reworks Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3, Serge Gainsbourg’s gorgeous La Javanaise and Cole Porter’s I Love Paris. But even in the originals you feel a particular cosmopolitanism seeping through the music: jazz colliding with European sensibilities and France colliding with African ones.
Cody is an equally sophisticated composer and pianist who likes to create mood-based pieces and solos in which a touch of ambiguity or mystery compounds the interest. Tenor saxophonist Karl Laskowski highlights the ambiguous elements with his dry sound and fine sense for weighting a solo, so evident on the pretty Pop It. Bassist Brendan Clarke and drummer James Waples play with a restraint that deepens the music’s shadows (rather than adding garish colour), and this helps Cody to generate a striking luminosity from the piano’s upper register. The cross-cultural rendition of I Love Paris is especially vivid, both musically