Stravinsky contended that music is "by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all" – that it's simply a speculation in sound and time. This seems to bypass Empirical. In six packed years, the British group have evolved from a contemporary jazz outfit to their present incarnation as a jazz/classical chamber ensemble. The band's 2008 debut album had such sassy titles as Fat Cat and Dark Lady, and their latest looms with weighty tracks – The Simple Light Shines Brightest, Cosmos, The Prophet. But if Empirical, augmented here by the classical Benyounes Quartet, sound at odds with Stravinsky's pragmatism, they nonetheless did plenty of fascinating speculating in sound and time in this gig, even if (as on the new album) they could have clipped a spare moment here and there.
The core quartet – saxophonist Nathaniel Facey, vibraphonist Lewis Wright, bassist Tom Farmer and drummer Shane Forbes – opened with Facey's soulfully plaintive long-note weave over a bass vamp (Yin and Yang) and Wright's punchily percussive stop-start theme, Bellsonian Scales. The Benyounes joined for Facey's The Simple Light Shines Brightest, in which a jazzily twisting, drums-shadowed strings melody gave way to a seductive daydream. Next came a fast, bebop vibes solo, before a typically composer-like alto sax break from Facey. This thoughtful and sophisticated performer sounded more like a french horn player than a saxophonist amid the mists of the Benyounes' floating opening to Farmer's Ascent and Descent.
Wright's The Prophet brought a rootsier, folk-melodic feel to the music. Early in the second half, the jazz group's freeflow reached a new heat, invoking the Coltrane quartet's tumultuous collective roar. In contrast, they came closer to Portico Quartet on Farmer's chiming The Healer, before powering up their jazz engine again for the whippy Empiricism. Lewis Wright was at his most delicate in the swirling, deep-toned strings lines on Forbes' Repentance, the most memorably transporting genre-blend of an uneven but engaging night.
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