Alina Bzhezhinska & HipHarp Collective: Reflections
Editor's Choice
Author: Jane Cornwell
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Musicians: |
Alina Bzhezhinska (h) |
Label: |
BBE |
Magazine Review Date: |
October/2022 |
Media Format: |
CD, LP, DL |
Catalogue Number: |
BBE716ADG |
RecordDate: |
Rec. 2021 |
On this, her much-anticipated sophomore album, Ukrainian born, London-based harp player and composer Alina Bzhezhinska forges ahead with a mission to re-imagine the harp in a jazz context and develop her own language in the process.
Emboldened by the acclaim that met 2017's Inspiration, a work in which she paid homage to Alice and (occasionally) John Coltrane, Bzhezhinska cherry picks from genres including trad jazz, spiritual jazz, trip hop and hip hop while bigging up Dorothy Ashby, that other doyenne of jazz harp. After setting out her stall with the Ashby-penned opener ‘Soul Vibrations, invested with psychedelic funk, Bzhezhinska takes the harp on a journey that variously floats, soars, meanders and spirals and, with tunes such as Alice Coltrane and Joe Henderson's ‘Fire’ (in which Tony Kofi's sax and Jay Phelps's trumpet burn bright) blazes a sonic trail. Kofi is there, too, on the ever affecting ‘Alabama’, which he and Bzhezhinska originally recorded to honour the Black Lives Matter movement, and joins Phelps and the vocalist Vimala Rowe on ‘AfroBlue’, a version that's up there with the best. Bzhezhinska's originals show off her compositional range: the spacious, Bill Evans/Jim Hall-inspired title track and the driving ‘Paris Sur Le Toit’, rapped over in French and English. ‘Meditation’, achingly pretty, closing the recording with an invitation to dream.
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