Nicolas Leirtrø's Action Now — Entrance

Nicolas Leirtrø's Action Now is a quartet which I immediately noticed includes one of my favorite modern free jazz performers, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Their lineup also includes Kit Downes on organ, Veslemøy Narvesen on drumset and Nicolas Leirtrø handling double bass and compositional duties. These are all musicians who hail from the Scandinavian or larger European jazz scene, which has been a rich vein of forward thinking music over the years. Entrance is their first album as a group, an hour long recording with eight tracks.

Gustafsson handles the primary melodic role, and his performance here a few degrees more conventional and tuneful than most of what I have heard him do. Though there are improvisational moments, there are certainly composed melodies in all of these pieces. Like a raspy throated blues singer, Gustaffson's tone is filled with such dirt and grit, giving his every note an aggressive, throaty conviction as he belts out the melodies. His volume and force are truly formidable, frequently eclipsing all the other members of the group.

The music that Nicolas Leirtrø has written has a significant hard bop influence in its cleverly constructed, blues derived head melodies, but more of a relaxed, dubby tempo, sometimes settling into a jam band or doom metal-esque pentatonic repetition, with many minutes of solos from the organ and flute, atop a single riff (the flute apparently played by Gustafsson!). Like the bands of Charles Mingus or later Miles Davis, the musicians unravel and reform the structure of the song as suits the mood. There are fiery dissolvations into noise that occur towards the end of many of the pieces, in which Gustafsson lets loose powerful, frenzied atonal bleats, Kit's organ grinds hard, and Narvesan erupts in a storm of fills. The piece named after the group, "Action Now", is perhaps the best melodic composition to be found here, with its strident, filmic melody, recalling Morricone.

This band certainly works together an improvisatory unit, with a sense of continuous movement as they traverse the abstract. That said, I feel that Mats Gustafsson's performance stands head and shoulders above the others in charisma, variety of techniques and unique character. Every time he plays a note, it could be no one else but him, and he has a great dramatic flair with how he contrasts different moments. The other members, by comparison, tend to be playing a mezzo forte.