Desert Drip

It’s maybe not a very usual response to music to think, ‘how clever!’, but cleverness is what comes to mind when listening to this absorbing album masterminded by US trumpeter Will Magid. There’s a lot of electronics and processing, but there’s also a lot of live playing, and it can be difficult to be certain which is which in the carefully controlled mashup. The details provided are a bit scanty, but sitar, clarinet, live or programmed drums, lutes and flutes back the leader’s clean trumpet sound, straight or processed, or take centre stage themselves. The musical organisation is intelligent, provocative and adept at wrong-footing the listener. The brief and concentrated development of ‘In a Milky Way’ suggests multiple interpretations, but waits until the last few seconds to make its central allusion (Miles Davis) perfectly clear.

The format of ‘Epirotika’ is typical; a rhythm from the Greek-Albanian borderlands, below a melody that could be from the Horn of Africa or further east, develops into a more focused quotation from Epirus and then, via chiptune, ripples and a slow funk beat, to an inflected blues scale – effectively an exploration of how the pentatonic scale mutates around the globe. Clever indeed.