Lemadi Trio — Canonical Discourse

Canonical Discourse is a four-track journey into taut, tense, and largely angular improv. It’s a release that wonderful shifts and awkwardly shambles along- through the jarring, discordant, noisy and intense.

The CD/ digital release appears on New Wave Of Jazz, and features two of the label's key players- Dirk Serries who curates/ runs the label, and his wife Martina Verhoeven- he plays archtop guitar and she plays the grand piano. They are joined on alto sax by José Lencastre.

Each of the four tracks has runtimes between eleven and fifteen-minute mark- with each of them having a fair bit of rewarding shift/ movement within their length. We open with the track “Detached Mode” which moves from taut maps of fluttering hisses, bounding piano hits, and guitar scarp ‘n’ manic pick. Onto slowly churning hazes of steadily horn fork ‘n’ boil, gloomy piano clunk, and broodingly guitar jangle/ clutter.

As we move through the album we come to the longest track “Disjunction”. It opens with a jagged trail of manic neck picks, squawking horn tone, and bass-bound piano clunk ‘n’ dart. As we move on we shift into rapid string scrubs, speeding key runs, and cheeky to seared horn tone trailing.

The album plays out with “Little Emphasis” which moves from hushed and drowsy blends of guitar pick drifts, compressed horn wonders, and steady-if-wavering key-clattering. Later on moving into mixes of darting-yet-gloom key shift, steady horn flirt, and baying to moodily rolling guitar tone detail.

It’s fair to say I enjoy most of New Wave Of Jazz’s output- but Canonical Discourse really stood as something rather special to me. It’s down to its blend of engaging annularity, the feel of tense gloominess, and the constant shift/ development of each of the tracks here. As with all of this labels releases the CD has a pressing of just 200 copies- so I’d act sooner than later, if you enjoy where angularly and broodingly gloomy improv meets....drop in here