Nala Sinephro : Endlessness
Ambient jazz existed prior to the 21st century, but its spectrum often felt too wide to encapsulate within one narrow framework. Where Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way transported post-bop groove into a more diffuse and spacious realm, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson lent a certain kind of eerie atmosphere to the ultra-cool abstraction of Evolution, the somehow still-underrated 1964 album by trombonist Grachan Moncur III. To say nothing of the free-jazz-on-the-moon slow-burn dissonance of Sun Ra’s more interplanetary excursions of the 1960s.
Space 1.8, the 2021 debut album by Caribbean-Belgian artist Nala Sinephro, presented a different kind of open space ripe for exploration when it arrived, released after 18 months of stuck-in-place pandemic stillness in which ambient music—as interesting as it is ignorable, as Brian Eno once described it—soothed a collective, claustrophobic angst. Yet that album contained as much movement as meditative calm, its rotating ensemble of some of the best contemporary jazz musicians lending their talents to a set of music that bathed its blues and roots in gentle washes of harp or synth.
Her follow-up to that album, Endlessness, is something like the inverse of Space 1.8, an album that’s always moving, constantly chasing highs and lows, but keeps returning back to its point of origin. Presented as 10 discrete tracks each titled “Continuum” in a sequence, Endlessness is essentially one long piece, each interconnected chapter built on a recurrent synth arpeggio that anchors the overall series of compositions. Though to say it’s without individual moments of gorgeousness and glory severely understates her efforts. From the launch of “Continuum 1,” Endlessness slowly gets off the ground with billowing synth arpeggios, a sprightly but laid-back shuffle of drums and melodic saxophone leads from James Mollison. There’s a stillness about it, continuously evolving though often feeling as if it’s shifting in place, changing shape more than progressing along a trajectory—until it erupts into a kind of rich burst of ecstasy midway through, an array of strings washing over the canvas.
Sinephro and her collaborators provide a dynamic journey throughout Endlessness, one that’s continuously shifting but always connecting where it’s been with where it’s going. The lush, gentle “Continuum 2” slowly grows into an aching, gorgeous minor key orchestral jazz piece, blanketed in an array of strings and a lonely, beautiful saxophone, whereas “Continuum 4” is a relatively brief space-age interlude with a subtle backing vocal. The gauzy “Continuum 5” feels essentially like a brief intro to the syncopated groove of “Continuum 6,” one of the most animated tracks here, its fat synth tones growing denser as the rhythm kicks up into higher tempos in short order, swirling itself up into a major key saxophone lead that feels ecstatic and bright. But as the album drifts in and out of recurrent motifs, echoing the cycles of life and patterns that recur in the natural world, it reaches a triumphant climax with “Continuum 10.” A chaotic but joyous closing cacophony, and a clash of sound that’s overwhelming but neither noisy or abrasive, it’s an exclamation mark on the affair, too active to be ambient. There’s nothing ignorable about it.
Label: Warp
Year: 2024
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Nala Sinephro : Endlessness
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