Lucas Niggli Big Zoom - Celebrate Diversity

Intakt 118

The liners on this one liken Lucas Niggli’s Zoom ensembles to lenses of varying powers of magnification. It’s an apt analogy and one that speaks to the precision properties at play in the drummer’s intricate compositions and execution. Intakt has been a receptive home to his past projects with no fewer than nine releases illustrating his talents as either leader or sideman. Big Zoom differs from its smaller Zoom counterpart in the addition of clarinetist Claudio Puntin and bassist Peter Herbert to the core trio of Niggli, trombonist Nils Wogram, doubling on melodica, and guitarist Philipp Schaufelberger. The ready-made tag of “chamber jazz” seems a convenient one to apply on the surface, but ends up cursory when it comes to corralling all the band is capable of playing and everything that goes into it.

For one thing, there’s the recurring complexity of Niggli’s improv-friendly charts and the frequently dizzying tempos he insists on playing them in. The lengthy title piece starts as an amorphous dirge, slowly coalescing via one of Niggli’s lubricious beats into a fluttering maze of contrapuntal horn lines. The collective is intimately accustomed to playing together and the closeness allows them to engage in one devilishly clever detour after another, subdividing and reconvening along a serpentine track that is near hitch-less in execution. Wogram and Puntin manage to sound like a horn section twice and sometimes even thrice their number, pairing together or peeling off in combinations with their colleagues. Both are expert at capitalizing on the voice-like properties of their instruments and the covey of duo and trio passages plugged into the pieces in a wonderful succession of animated, but affable conversations. Schaulfelberger alternates easily between floating gossamer chords and sharper toned rhythm picking, aligning with the growling pitches of Wogram one moment and filling the fissures in a typically earthy Niggli percussion pattern the next as on the jovially rendered “Pidgin.”

The antique board game of Snakes and Ladders works as another handy analogue to the Zoom’s sound and approach. Players negotiate the pieces at accelerated speeds, ascending and descending so fast that complacent attention often results in missed singularities. The pinball pyrotechnics of Klezmerish “Gross Sprünge” provide a fitting case in point, jockeying between hyperkinetic and relatively restive poles. Even on languid pieces like “Screen Sleep” details abound. Niggli and his friends sustain the subtlety and elegance so often associated with the chamber jazz rubric, but manage to inject healthy doses of musical amphetamines into the circulatory system. The familiar phrase adopted as the disc’s title might sound cliché, but as Niggli’s music makes abundantly clear, it’s a sentiment on worth pursuing with vigor and resolve.

~ Derek Taylor