Review Summary: A contemplative nap in the sun. Positive energy in raw form.
Jazz is a musical chimera. Its a polychotomy of different styles, feelings and methods that have been developed over the decades to bring us to where we are now: amidst a flooded market of contemporary jazz, reworks of timeless classics and avant-garde displays of musical brilliance. But what we’re truly left with is an incredibly comprehensive catalogue of seemingly endless listening options. Jazz can be tabulated into a wide range of different genres but the easiest method of classification is the feeling it instills in the listener.
Kenmochi Hidefumi’s
Shakespeare is no different. I could write paragraph after paragraph describing the high tempo chord-melody and his proclivity for fingerstyle, but that’s beside the point.
Shakespeare is an album you listen to and feel content. Like an afternoon sun on your face or grabbing a beer with old friends;
Shakespeare is comfortable. The quick paced hand percussion and soulful guitar licks accompany a light piano characteristic of a Sunday morning.
Although inviting and warming, the feeling is far from lazy. With songs like Vermillion Sky and Leopardo clocking relatively high bpm’s, a sense of urgency and productivity emanate through the tracks and culminate in down-tempo segments of prolonged percussion breaks and light piano melodies. The drum tracks sound at home among the other jazz elements in terms of texture and sound, but beat is slightly less conventional. The percussion on the album feels reminiscent of breakbeat and progressive house as Kenmochi weaves complex and borderline break-neck drum tracks with his classical style of guitar. Although thematically consistent, every song has a unique feel and some sort of differing unorthodox element.
Synthesizers are a relative rarity in most jazz albums and in some eyes are blasphemous to the sanctity of the genre. Kenmochi not only incorporates synths into a majority of tracks, but allows them to act as focal points in songs like Maglev and Sputnik where the concluding motifs end with powerful synthesized melodies. This playful but impassioned style is what allows this record to set itself from others in the genre. An energizing and expressive album in a genre fraught with smoke-filled rooms and glasses of cognac,
Shakespeare is a breath of fresh air, and an exhilarating breath at that.
