Lara Jones: Ensō

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Lara Jones (bs, ss, ts, elec)

Label:

self-released

September/2020

Media Format:

DL

RecordDate:

February 2020

This solo release has been constructed wholly on saxophonist Lara Jones' experience of travel within a period of her life when both romance and stress ran as parallel as train tracks. Her sound observations bring to light a personal-scape of internal dialogue, opening with ‘St. Pancras’, a station that featured heavily as she went between Leeds and London. During this 10 minute piece there is a jump into foreboding, rhythmic noise; it's raw and loud like intense emotion.

At times her sound resembles swifts sweeping into their twilight dance; digitised saxophone breaths lift and lower in a wide sky. They are pulled out further and longer in ‘Window Seat’ as if Jones has fallen into a half-sleep during a note. Miniature bell scrapes imbue it with a quality somewhere between meditation and fatigue before it opens out, as if leaving the Euro-tunnel, and pulls into the track ‘Calais’. This is a highlight with Lara's recording of migrants she met there who gather to sing together at the end of the day. Their doleful chant is so real, and emerges as if from clouds of train steam.

Field recordings of her journeys with train whistles and tannoys, and excerpts of a phone chat with her mum make for a touching listen. Jones' saxophones (mainly soprano and tenor) are single threads of a cloth of sound that becomes darker and electrified in the final piece, ‘Sejoin’. In some ways Jones could have gone further, twisting noise to add further texture, however, the echoing space she offers highlights what is there and signifies a talent who is stretching the elastic edges of jazz to explore our inner worlds.

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