Momoko Gill : Momoko
Jazz and dance music have always swanned together: Johnny “Hammond” Smith’s dancefloor funk from the ’70s to London keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones’ 21st century polymorphic mix of dub, hip-hop, R&B, funk, and bass-heavy UK club culture. Stanley Nelson’s Birth of The Cool references the late great culture critic Greg Tate, who puts forth the notion that the these are all facts that play and track today. You can get it all in. Grooves, vibes, elongated stretches of bliss. Sure, you can add a lil sumpin’ to it, put that smoke in the air. These arrangers make rhythmic atmospheres, jazz or not, that allow listeners, dancers, festival goers, or red-cup living room late-night parties to feel something. It’s good for the mental. That task may sound easy.
Well, it’s not. Last year’s clean living, minimal-sounding Clay, from Matthew Herbert and Momoko Gill, treated us to a peculiar-sounding record that went about moving dancefloors and asses most organically. Drummer/vocalist Momoko Gill constructed these abstract, but not flashy, drum patterns, repurposed in an art-rock treatise, making bare-bones, weathered constructs that resembled house music looped from ambient sources. It felt completely original; Lord Herbert and Momoko Gill tapped upon something that in no way resembled the cut, copy, paste glut of electro-garble that floods the trades.
Listen, I read tea leaves. As soon as I saw that this debut self-produced album, Momoko, was recorded at the landmark Total Refreshment Centre in north-east London, ground-freakin’ zero for the UK jazz renaissance? Son. I was in.
In some respects, the previous collaborative project with Shinobi Herbert and this formal introduction to the world by Momoko Gill are in conversation with one another. Where the previous, Clay, gave us a pardon the pun, a molded version of this artist, using her attributes, voice, and production skills, to wrap around the Herbert genre, Momoko, in eleven tracks, gives us the deglaze. A cutter. Better proximity to what one must believe is this artist’s modal instinct, and it’s moving. Regal. Feeling so insular and personal, these stories entwined in magical production, some jazz adjacent, others, again, swanning out in that plush soul and funk heated up by beat culture.
A drummer’s meter can be fierce one moment and faint the next, yet always on time. The ability to know what and what not to place in certain gaps remains in their drumstick DNA. Gill’s “I’m not pushing it too far like a diva” vocals are the connective tissue and secret sauce here, and don’t get it twisted, she is a virtuoso behind the kit, as evidenced by the snare skills on “No Others” right from the jump. Classic jazz trio surroundings waft from her style. But it’s in that faint voice where she’s always pulling back, and somehow that projects more emotion, a trick I wish other contemporary vocalists could learn from.
For the beat fiends, she offers a trip-hop heady arrangement on “Shadowboxing” and the weirdly beautiful beat oddity that is “Test A Small Area.” But amidst all the magic, clicks, bass drum hits, Herbert mixing skills and the all-star players who appear (Alabaster DePlume, Coby Sey, Tirzah, and others), it’s Gill, her voice, her production, that poignancy and raw realism that comes through, fully heart-string tuggin’, with that faint little voice, as on the confessional “2close2farr” that exposes that big hearted emotion, which leaves Momoko, a grandiose communique from a triple threat artist, who we hope shall be around for a long while, no matter if she makes us groove or get a little emotional. She’s got that stuff that no machine can manufacture.
Label: Strut
Year: 2026
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