Jazz breaking news: Albums Of The Year – Number 10: Quiet Inlet By Food

Ask for your copy today. But fear not if you’re snowed in, temporarily trapped with your laptop behind a wardrobe, or your newsagent has simply sold out, over the next fortnight day by day jazzwisemagazine.com brings you a look at each of the new albums to make the list starting today with number ten, Quiet Inlet by Food. 

Food began life originally as a Cheltenham Jazz Festival commission and well before the huge interest in all things Norwegian ex-Loose Tubes saxman Iain Ballamy decided to chill out as it were by teaming up with drummer Thomas Strønen, shakuhachi-inspired trumpeter Arve Henriksen and bassist Mats Eilertsen for his own Feral records release Food in 1996. Two further records followed at long intervals apart and six years after the last, and in probably their most notable acclaimed album to date, Food reconfigured once more for their QI line-up and first on ECM with Ballamy bringing in Austrian guitarist Christan Fennesz to the Food fight for live concerts recorded in Molde and Oslo caught here. And crucially with Henriksen and Eilertsen long gone, also in came Nils Petter Molvaer, the man renowned for turning ECM into an unlikely if temporary jazz chilltronica redoubt in the late-1990s with the release of Khmer. Quiet Inlet’s seven tracks have a hushed intensity that you’d expect with NPM involved but which collectively reach sonic heights more effectively than either NPM’s recent work whether with his 2009 album Hamada or as a member of Martin France’s Spin Marvel. Molvaer and Ballamy excel on the duelling diphthong-heavy ‘Chimaera’ and ‘Cirrina’ but check out the silence between the spaces if that’s not too much of a cliché of the genre. It’s more or less a compulsory requisite with this album, that has a gravitational pull that only Jon Hassell and a few others can even come close to, and something Jazzwise writers warmed to instinctively.

– Stephen Graham