Charles Bradley Menahan Street Band
Victim Of Love

The growth in popularity of jazz music in recent years has been described as a renaissance or new chapter for the genre. Attracting new audiences has seen a growth in acclaim for international artists including Kamasi Washington & The West Coast Get Down collective or BadBadNotGood. This resurgence has also been felt within british jazz scene. Musicians such as Yussef Kamaal, Shabaka Hutchings, Ruby Rushton, Nubya Garcia or Moses Boyd have put a new stamp on jazz music by fusing elements of classic jazz with modern sounds. Polish septet, EABS applies a similar philosophy to their music, blending traditional Polish Jazz with sounds from other genres, thus creating a new and personal interpretation of modern jazz.EABS debut album entitled “Repetitions (Letters To Krzysztof Komeda)” is a dedication to Polish Jazz legend Krzysztof Komeda. This album is an analysis of conscientiously selected compositions by Komeda between 1962-1967. EABS explores some of Komeda’s lesser-known compositions featured in ballet etudes, movies, short films, documentaries, animations and compositions illustrating Polish poems recited in German.Carefully chosen compositions, the background of the movies for which the music had been written and Marek Pędziwiatr’s lyrics all add up to “Repetitions” being some kind of a concept album about the condition of the human soul in the 21st century. The questions one may ask might be similar to those which could have been asked by the artists witnessing post-war debris: will history come full circle? Lack of knowledge, flourishing idiocracy, aggression, aiming for conflicts, shortage of community spirit and love may lead to another doomsday. Perhaps we simply aren’t able to see the impending doom now… Just like in a poem by Czesław Miłosz, “A Song on the End of the World”, to which Krzysztof Komeda wrote “Waltzing Beyond”.EABS have created their unique compositions by employing an approach exercising the idea of “reconstruction from deconstruction” where sampling and looping are merged with jazz improvisations. The injection of hip-hop, jungle, funk, gospel and electronic music add a futuristic tone to the tracks. However EABS have made a conscious decision to ensure their nod to Komeda enables the spirit of the Polish Jazz to remain alive. Michal Urbaniak another Polish Jazz legend is the only guest on the album. His violin can be heard on the track “Free Witch And No Bra Queen/ Sult”. creditsreleased June 17, 2017

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sault-nine/The nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down” is secretly about the spirits of the dead. The centuries-old children’s tune doubles as a macabre tale of children being walled inside the London Bridge, or buried under its foundation, to ensure that the structure never crumbles. At least that’s the theory advanced by Alice Bertha Gomme, a noted British folklorist and scholar of children’s games. Like the fables of the Brothers Grimm, whose bloody tales were sanitized for bedtime retelling, many nursery rhymes have equally disturbing origins. On NINE, the elusive British group SAULT channel childhood rhymes—not just their repetitive, earwormy melodies but also their ominous undertones—into songs with a deceptively simple air that are laden with grief.NINE is SAULT’s third album in just a little over a year, and it builds on the penchant for mystery that they established with their first two albums, 5 and 7, both released in 2019 under a cloak of anonymity. The album will be available—whether as a stream, download, or CD/LP—for just 99 days. Where their first albums were rooted in neo-soul and funk, 2020’s Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) borrowed liberally from Afrobeat and the blues. With NINE, they add new layers—of mystery but also flippant humor—to their sound.We laugh when things are funny but recently, particularly over the past year and a half, I began buckling over when things were neither humorous nor joyous. Laughter made more sense than sadness. It required more physical exertion, and helped me move when I wanted to hide in a crawl space. It’s that energy of laughing because everything is terrible that beats through the brief opener, “Haha,” an a cappella chant that resembles a playground rhyme set to syncopated handclaps. “How about/Ha ha ha ha/How about/Ha ha ha ha,” runs the refrain, leaving little inkling of its origin story. Are we laughing at a joke or a person? And “how about” what exactly? That man, that dog, them Yankees? The meaning is as cryptic as the band, but they do offer a hint: “How about the love.” Looking around the globe today, that four-letter word is as urgent as it is furtive, and while SAULT are private, the grief they sing of has been projected onto the world stage, stoking a sadness that could make you want to disappear. It’s the type of misery that elicits a desperate ha ha ha ha. How about the love, right?