Unspeakable

There it was, the last sentence of Mike Gates‘ five star review of Steve Swallow‘s „Winter Songs“: „Warm and inviting, it feels like a proper old-school contemporary jazz session of the very best kind.“ The phrase „old-school“ creates a problem. I am not too interested in an old-school jazz session. And Steve Swallow transcends this category with „Winter Songs“. As immaculate as it is, as melodic and as far away from any upheaval (on the surface), the whole album with all its short pieces is the best album he‘s ever made as a bandleader.

This is a strangely adventurous, whimsically courageous, deeply honest album in which only the surface structure makes you think of „old school“, nostalgia, good friends drinking tea and having a good time. True that is, but beneath these known formula there‘s hiding a love of life, a melancholia, something blue and velvet and blue velvet. What an album! All these bitter-sweet in-betweens! Another lifer! In the same way, „Belladonna Nocturne“ is not just simply „old school ambient music“. In spite of life’s backward glance and all that. As Wyndham Wallace writes:

„With broader horizons than 2022’s intimate Player, Piano, Lanois’ ninth solo album is envisaged as an inevitably darker successor to 2005’s similarly instrumental Belladonna. He’s still worldbuilding, his affectingly lush, resonant production wonderfully showcased amid “Steel Mill”’s textured minimalism and the quietly spectral “Marionette”, both distant, jazz-affiliated cousins of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score. But he’s more experimental, with “Canadian National”’s felted piano gently unpredictable and “Warp Sustain” pitching layers of treated guitar and pedal steel against one another. If “Snow Lake” and “Early Days” sound Eno-esque, that’s indicative of Lanois’ role on Apollo.“