Jonas Cambien’s Maca Conu — Popular Misconceptions

Here we have Maca Conu, a jazz ensemble headed by Belgian pianist Jonas Cambien, which has existed since 2021 and has released a few other recordings. This latest album, "Popular Misconceptions", has come out on Sonic Transmissions, and is thirty-six minutes long, with seven songs two to six minutes in length. The instrumentation is classic acoustic jazz, with saxophone, double bass, drums and piano.

For the entirety of the opener "Tree Frog", Cambien repeats a Philip Glass-esque ostinato while horns engage in drones. This turns out to be a deceptively ambient opener for an album of heavy outer space jazz, however, this kind of repeating figure remains a stylistic device for the entirety of the recording, with the 2nd piece also based around a repeating figure, clearly inspired by Afrobeat, with its thunderous groove. The album's freer moments like "Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner" are closer to later Davis, Coltrane or Sanders, establishing a distinctly 70s palette of influences for this album.

Though there are elements of improvisation, this is a tuneful and structured album, with the band progressing through a series of repetitive figures, advancing to the next at predetermined points, so that each song is a kind of calculated build, and each lulls into a rhythm just long enough to surprise you when it changes. The climactic melodies towards the end of each pieces are ornate scalar runs. There is a great deal of restraint in the way it is composed and played, as the band could clearly shred if they chose to, or play a far less repetitive flavour of music.

You'll find no swinging hi-hats here, with the drums here mostly closer to something you might call a breakbeat, often lurching with a strange and illogical syncopation, something referred to in the electronic music world as 'broken beat'. This group are determined to find the danceable pulse in the strangest, most asymmetrical figures, a good example being the track "Everything Looks like a Nail". Having grown up on technical metal of various kinds, these details are the seasoning that make this album satisfying.

The production is perfect for the style of music, with a sense of immediacy and live energy, so that one knows the band is playing together in the same room, but also the perfect clarity that modern recording allows. The drum tone, especially, is perfectly handled, with perfectly crisp cymbals and snare tones, yet warm and analog, and never harsh.

The group's ambition is shown by the way each successive piece travels in a new, unexpected direction, with the softly glowing ambience of "Factoids" giving way to the grinding organ solos and plodding rock bass of the closing jam called "Desert Rat". There is a whimsicality with which the group incorporates whichever ideas they like. A very solid and well-rounded recording.