Folks

As their titles make clear both these new CDs featuring Paul Dunmall wear their allegiances on their sleeves, if you'll pardon the pun. Which means whether you enjoy them is probably a matter of black and white.

　　The Spiritual Empathy duets look back very clearly to Coltrane in their soundworld, their musical form and even their titles. Both Dunmall (alto and tenor saxes) and Levin (drums) are superbly fluent performers, able to sustain peaks of energy and invention for very long periods, and (even more impressive) sustain an overall shape, demonstrated by the remarkable sense of completion at the end of, say, tracks 1 and 5. They create a feeling of continual flow and are then suddenly able to focus it, and explode out again without any hesitation or awkwardness. Levin's drumming on track 5 is to me particularly magical, an outstanding use of the classic drum and cymbal kit.

　　Folks, I have to admit, left me cold. I feel that the folk idiom has been mined in jazz with much greater conviction by John Surman or Jan Garbarek, to name just two. The short pieces on this album (mostly compositions by either Dunmall or Rogers, with an enjoyable but brief performance by singer Polly Bolton on one track) generally seem studied, even in the 'free' passages. The recordings also sound a little on the dull side. They move around between jazz and folk without convincing me, at least, what direction the disc finally is moving in. Only in the Paul Rogers composition 'Lament 4' does the folk territory spring to life, with enough harmonic interest and enough ambiguity to make this a very moving piece, though all too brief. Both Dunmall and Rogers are inspirational players - it's a shame to hear them reining themselves in with limited material. (Nick Couldry)