Kynan Robinson's en Rusk '1000 Wide'

This handsome production, replete with nice photographic details deployed with exuberant design sense, speaks to me of Melbourne, and that is a great boon. Equivalents here in Sydney can be found in Phil Slater’s beautifully presented recent recording (Strobe Coma album Virgo), Band Of Five Names’s Severance and Steve Hunter’s If Blue Was Orange. Also, dare I mention it, Freedivers (a slim-line no-budget disc). Another nice Melbourne producton is Way Out West’s Footscray Station.

The music on 1000 Wide would be fascinating if the disc came in a brown paper bag, but the artefact is itself important, awakening the senses immediately, as any collector of Blue Note, ECM, Impulse, Contemporary, Riverside and other great labels will confirm.

Eric Griswold’s prepared piano, sounding somewhat like an African thumb piano, springs first from the speakers, with an effect like the memorable tuned wok passage on Clarion Fracture Zone’s album Blue Shift. Horns, bass and drums (Kynan Robinson’s trombone, Adam Simmons’s tenor saxophone, Danny Fisher’s drums, Mark Shepherd’s bass) make a bouncing, rocking rhythmic bed beneath it, an ostinato somewhat reminiscent of Mingus in particularly cheerful mood. There is little more to this larger than life miniature. Two minutes, 17 seconds. Perfect. It’s called Travel A Moment Without Fear.

The second track opens with a feeling so similar that you think it is part of the same thing, and in a way it is. The horn lines are extended, touching on R&B and funky feels leading to a wild happy solo by Simmons with trombone obligato which verges nicely on duet. Cut to to a superb minimal solo piano statement by Andrea Keller. The horns then begin chanting and rocking softly beneath the piano and this little suite fades to hushed mallets on cymbals from Danny Fisher, opening the next track and leading to a ballad feeling with a lovely open trombone solo from Robinson.

So logically does track follow track on this beautfully recorded disc (engineered and mixed by Ben Hart) that long sequences sound as if they are all the one suite, full of contrasts, of dancing percussive exuberance and limpid harmonies. At times it sounds like a concerto for Andrea Keller (she is actually on six of the nine tracks), so beautifully poised and expressive is her playing. I think this might be my favourite Keller on record.

This is a very pleasing disc indeed. I’ve had it for a while and it still sounds very fresh. It sounds fresh and vivid behind me even as I try to concentrate on what I am writing. If you haven’t begun collecting Australian contemporary jazz and jazz-related music yet, this would be a good place to start. Then get the the others I’ve mentioned above.