Bare, Unfolding by Kaja Draksler octet

Following on from their two acclaimed full-lengths, Gledalec (2017) and Out For Stars (2020) – albums energised by the timeless poetry of Pablo Neruda, Gregor Strniša and Robert Frost – the Kaja Draksler Octet turns its focus on the allusive haiku of Matsuo Basho for Bare, Unfolding, a captivating collection rich with imagery, imagination and compositional ingenuity.
Like the poetic forms inspiring it, Bare, Unfolding conveys with minimalist clarity the salience of specific moments, stripping away all that’s unnecessary and peripheral until only the essence of the instant remains. This is meditative music, pregnant with pause and poignant stillness, positing a nexus where Eastern and Western classical traditions collide in jazz’s oneiric outer zones.
Serenity exudes here in the hallucinatory pulse of Onno Govaert’s bespoke drum set-up, assorted hand percussion and Ab Baars’ whispering shakuhachi, ritualistic elements drawn from Japanese Gagaku’s “elegant music”, while Draksler’s piano casts subtle phrase-shifting beneath the undulating drones of George Dumitriu’s violin and Ada Rave’s tension-ratcheting tenor sax. Hypnotic rhythms coalesce and then fragment, abstract patterns mirrored by the incantatory wordplay of vocalists Laura Polence and Björk Níelsdóttir, as they harmoniously recast Basho’s poems pungent with meaning and metaphor.
Into her alien court music, Draksler weaves other diverse tropes – incongruent threads in less adept hands – her keys freighting influences from Morton Feldman to Cecil Taylor, while overt nods to Handel materialise during the seraphic finale of ‘Flimsy Curtain/Plum’.
An ingenious, often joyous work, inhabiting what Alexander Hawkins refers to in his erudite liner notes as “a space of near-suspended animation”, Bare, Unfolding is well named for a work toying with temporal notions, an album boldly flaunting its disparate influences in blossoms of intimate and fearless creation.
- Spencer Grady

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