Remedy
(Ropeadope)
8/10
You know that feeling when you revisit a home from your past, to find the furniture changed and walls repainted, so any familiarity or nostalgia are jumbled with an unsettling newness? This third Zela Margossian Quintet album is like that. The familiarity of the snaking melodies of Margossian’s Armenian roots, and of her rigorous classical training being entwined with jazz’s open-endedness, are still there, but her compositions are even more sophisticated and varied, with a delightful sense of mischief sometimes creeping in. The band, meanwhile, is joined by guest artists on four pieces, swelling the already expansive palette of colours generated by Margossian’s piano, Stuart Vandegraff’s saxophones, Jacques Emery’s bass, Alexander Inman-Hislop’s drums and Adem Yilmaz’s array of percussion.
Phil Slater’s trumpet cries gently over a lament called Indifferent World – a reality with which we’re all familiar. The stateliness of Jenny Eriksson’s viola da gamba features on What If, the title possibly asking what would happen were that instrument added to this already exotic band. The answer? A dreamy timelessness. Virna Sanzone applies her plush voice to the Armenian lyrics of How I Wish, and flamenco guitarist Damian Wright makes Kintsugi glisten like sunlight on water.
Top picture: Shane Rozario.
https://www.zelamargossian.com/