The debut album from musicians Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa is called Customer's Copy and that title belies the brave sort of jazz within its grooves. This is hardly generic music, and the stuff here is iconoclastic. And that shouldn't be a surprise when one remembers that Karlsson's grandfather was Don Cherry. And while her mother, Neneh Cherry, was herself a bit of an iconoclast, even she didn't attempt boundary-pushing stuff like this.
"Preferring the stark contrast of analog/digital, acoustic/electric, and natural/unnatural sounds, Karlsson contributes synthesizers in addition to piano, celesta, and bells, while Iwasa collides anachronistic 90s Yamaha keyboard and guitaret with contrabass recorder, drums, kalimba, and three of Don Cherry's instruments: one of his trumpets as well as two of his "zen saxophones," handmade woodwinds appending reed mouthpieces to plastic plumbing parts, also called Don’s kettles after their high-pitched sound."
That marketing copy seems essential for approaching this as the few compositions here are bracing in their scope. "Dot 2 Dot", the epic 22-minute anchor of this record, finds the players taking a minimalist method. The instruments hover and circle each other, and give plenty of room for silence in the spaces between bursts of music. There are moments here that are horn-based which feel familiar, and recall Jon Hassell briefly, but the majority of this is as spacious as anything on ECM decades ago, and as risky as an Eno/Fripp collaboration, if not quite as harsh on the ears. The second track, "Charlie Vincent", made me think of Holger Czukay efforts, and bits of Eighties Miles. It's sinister, evocative, and even reminiscent of a John Carpenter soundtrack in spots. Customer's Copy closes with the brief "Canis Minor", a track which uses what sounds like a gamelan.
Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa conjure up a vibe here that's largely outside traditional jazz. The appeal of this record remains the mood conjured, and how this feels as light as air, and as heavy as a record from Terry Riley, for example. Without being pretentious, these two musicians have managed to provide a way for a listener to get transported, and utterly hypnotized by the soundscapes here.
Customer's Copy is out on Blank Forms.
[Photo: Lena Shkoda]