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Alexander Hawkins / Elaine Mitchener Quartet: UpRoot
By Track review of "OM-SE / Environment Music"The album is loaded with alternating flows, variances in pitch, pensive interludes, frenetic pulses, swelling cadenzas and loosely organized subplots, enamored by the vocalist's adventurous scat phrasings and velvety singing. Otherwise, "OM-SE Environment Music" is the lengthiest track at 13:23, spiced with drummer Stephen Davis' trickling rim-shots, rumbling tom-tom patterns, and enlivened by Mitchener's free-flight and lithely executed vocalizations.
Hawkins' builds tension amid his ascending block chords and melodic intervals that tender a flock of disparate tonal contrasts as the quartet becomes emboldened via its free-form rampages, along with several aberrations of the primary harmonic components. Yet the venomous plot subsides when bassist Neil Charles takes a solo spot, guiding his cohorts into a lightly swinging groove that ends in a whisper. Hence, the musicians' cross numerous musical domains during this exhilarating program that broadcasts a host of persuasive viewpoints and fractured subsets of established paradigms.
Track Listing
Why Is Love Such a Funny Thing?; The Miracle / You; UpRoot; If You Say So; Blasé; OM-SE / Environment Music; Joy; Directives / Walk Nicely / I’ll Meet You There.
Personnel
Alexander Hawkins
pianoAlexander Hawkins: piano; Elaine Mitchener: voice; Neil Charles: double bass; Stephen Davis: drums, percussion.
Album information
Title: UpRoot | Year Released: 2017 | Record Label: Intakt Records