Assemblage by Simon Nabatov Trio

Simon Nabatov’s supercharged trio featuring the world-beating rhythm section of bassist Mark Helias and drummer Tom Rainey pops like a boogie of weasels throughout this gloriously inventive collection fuelled on a frenetic directness which betrays its New York provenance.

An incisive collage of approaches, unified by a prolix-detonating concision that chomps straight for the jugular, Assemblage swings from jazz-indebted carnivals of sustained eight-note pulse, with ‘Upstream’ and ‘Take a Breather’ huffed-up on five boroughs brio, bursting with lung-busting chicanery and express-paced verve, to the more strident compositional strategies of ‘Uncoil’ and ‘Hammered’, two intricately-structured, gristle-trimmed mood pieces which erupt in combustible technicolour like a Jackson Pollock sucker-punch risked on the turn of a dime.

Zigging between cantering improvisation and subtle communion, the dozen pieces on Assemblage evolve in an intricate, though never showy, analogue to Jean Dubuffet’s sublime butterfly-winged mosaics, which at their surface scintillate with a chaotic bricolage of disparate components, but upon closer scrutiny reveal an ornate patchwork of molecular power, piebald with elemental beauty. Zoom out. Get another view. What first emerged as a puckish, playful bedlam becomes a gilded labyrinth that’s ripe for endless (re)discovery, an oneiric amalgam forged through flair, finesse and erudition.

Whether on this album’s four engrossing onomatopoeic abstracts – seething in glitchy prickles of Nabatov’s live iPad-derived electronics and sporting titles like Snow White’s lesser-known sidekicks (with ‘Plucky’, ‘Frisky’ and ‘Stretchy’ all taking their place alongside the more regular ‘Grumpy’) – or while reverently stoking the flickering embers of Bill Evan’s ‘quiet fire’ during the delicious meditations of ‘Daily Sorrows’, Assemblage encourages a radical change in our focus, a multi-layered and complex deep-listening approach better suited to garner its manifold delights.

Spencer Grady

Simon Nabatov, pianist and composer, was born in Moscow in 1959.
In 1979 he emigrated to the USA, spent in NY next 10 years and 1989 he moved to Germany.
Simon Nabatov played with the "who's who" of the jazz and improvised music community, gave concerts in over 60 countries, appeared on the numerous international festivals, received prizes and documented his music on 30 CD's under his own name.