Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Quintet - ONJQ Live in Lisbon

Clean Feed 63

Despite the reliable praise heaped on Otomo Yoshihide’s eclectic releases, I’ve purposely shied away from his work. It’s an errant inclination mainly born of cost-prohibitive import prices and one I’m recognizing the folly of with ONJQ Live in Lisbon. Like Ken Vandermark, Yoshihide is a player well versed in free jazz, canonical works. This concert date finds his regular quintet in the company of frequent Vandermark confrere Mats Gustafsson and the Swedish saxophonist plants a nest of primed blasting caps under the band’s already explosive chassis. The set opens to the strains of a rousing rendition of “Song for Che”, Gustafsson leading the charge with a rising Brötzmannian tenor blast and the rest of the ensemble soon following him in the collective vertical leap. Bassist Mizutani Hiroaki’s bass strings braid a resonant harmonic bass and the rhapsodic emancipatory overtones of the Charlie Haden classic come through in full bloom. It’s coupled in medley form with Yoshihide’s own “Reducing Agent”, a guitar-monopolizing freak-out that shows him hardly reticent in indulging his inner-Haino and Sharrock with swathes of roiling distortion and feedback. Drummer Yoshigaki Yasuhiro, who doubles on trumpet later in the program, also assumes an integral role the action with an arena-style workout at his kit. Also on the docket, canny covers of Dolphy’s “Serene”, here retooled as a gradually building tone canvas broken by several interludes into lopsided swing, and Jim O’Rourke’s “Eureka”, an anthemic piece that blends folk forms and textured sound collages with balladic grace to a crescendoing release. But the disc’s centerpiece is a 22-minute version of Yoshihide’s own “Flutter”, a cousin to Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”, where Gustafsson once again earns the right to consideration as potential permanent addition to the band. With this disc as reliable yardstick, I fully intend on tapping the wallet for ingress into Yoshihide’s earlier efforts.

~ Derek Taylor