Michael Webb received 1st prize in the National Jazz Writing Competition in 2007. This is one of his submitted reviews.
In The Thousands trumpeter Phil Slater has brilliantly resolved into a unique idiom the spectrum of musical ideas he has been developing and exploring on record and live for almost a decade—the streamlined virtuosity of Miles Davis’ 1960s bands, art and electronic music experimentalism, exotic Australian and Southeast Asian indigenous musical elements, chorale-like melodic stasis, and his trio Band of Five Names’ extension of the Necks’ Australian jazz minimalism.
Band of Five Names companions, pianist Matt McMahon and drummer Simon Barker, and the Necks’ bassist, Lloyd Swanton, complete Slater’s quartet. Separately and together, these players have forged a whole new direction in improvised music in Australia (many of the results of which have been released on Barker’s Kimnara label). In these musicians’ originality of vision expressed through the timbres, textures and structures of Slater’s music on the album, there is an evocation of mythic place and time, and in the sound and role of his solitary horn, a sense of existential quest.
In sequence, the seven compositions are near epic in scope. From beautifully shaped melodies emerge organic improvisations drawing on a wellspring of nuance, inflection and tonal shading, supported by deep grooves weathered into a soundscape of shimmering, mirage-like ensemble crescendos that swell with great intensity and dissolve into calm.
Tedium, the third track, charts the albums’ first climax. Texturally and dynamically it builds relentlessly, the piano’s agitated semiquaver patterning urging the weary solo trumpet onwards towards the summit of some as yet unconquered peak.
The sixth and title track, the album’s longest, feels like a companion piece to Tedium, complementing in its lyricism and thrilling virtuosity the yearning of that track. In The Thousand’s refrain as well as the opalescent piano tremolo chording, striding bass and lashing drums of the closing section of the piece, there is conveyed a sense of exhilaration and relief.
Two of the tracks Slater has recorded elsewhere: Lissom on McMahon’s Paths and Streams released last year, and Bone Epilogue (which is related to a Sculthorpe melody) on his Strobe Coma Virgo of 2003. The latter piece on this new album has an additional Reprise section that brings the album to a marvelous conclusion with a kind of understated grandeur.
Slater’s trumpet has never sounded more relaxed yet urgent, never more jubilant or resigned, luxurious or forlorn as on this album. The purity of his tone, sureness of his attack and the flow of his ideas are frequently startling, even after repeated listens.
From the elegant geometric simplicity of the album cover art to the grand melodic sweep and sequencing of its compositions and the inspired playing by outstanding Australian musicians, The Thousands is progressive Australian music that simply should be heard, on disc and live. Such are the nature of its musical discoveries and emotional explorations that The Thousands will long be played and played along to, studied, enjoyed and shared with friends. Discover it now rather than later and spread the word.
