Review Summary: Steezy-listening newjazz
Of the many notable names clogging up the nu nu jazz scene currently percolating in ye olde seat of empire, Alfa Mist lays claim to the steeziest sobriquet of the bunch. This is his main appeal, and anybody who tells you otherwise is foolish. Of course it helps that the flesh that gives this pseudonym life was a beatmaking wunderkind who, upon deciding he wanted to play some jazz piano samples for real, began a steady transformation from pupil of the esteemed Youtube School of Music to composer for the London Contemporary Orchestra, but it was mostly the name that carried him through. With this affirmed by the snappiest moniker on sputnik (suck it), we can move on to the fact that this rather talented musician has released a new album named
Variables.
The contents of
Variables are, uh,
multifarious. It contains:
- one bebop-adjacent opener featuring a slippery leading melody laid down by vivacious horns followed by a mandatory onslaught of agile soloing
- two tracks where Mister Mist channels his inner beatmaker of yesteryear to provide pithy and smoov backings for his own concise multisyllabic bars, accentuating such grim truth-seekers as “Three options: music, sport, or crime”
- three elegant nu-fusion odysseys bristling with suave musicality
- three chunes with actual vocalists at the helm
- a couple of ephemeral stocking fillers in rather dire need of engorgement (whoops!)
If this all signposts incongruity to your sensitive sensibilities, worry ye not —
Variables makes for delightful company, and my weeklong dalliance with its contours have filled my hollow heart with love.
You'll hear it as 2023's most tasteful guitar solo unfolds across the delicate title track, as gentle distortion pushes extended chord shapes into the foreground with remarkable restraint. You'll hear it in the mysterious outros that bend themselves into question marks at the end of winding harmonic journeys. You'll hear it in the customarily ebullient drum performances that pepper the ceaseless driving energy of the longer tracks with deft and dextrous flutters. You'll hear it in the pivoting chord progression of “Cycles”, as it feints its rhythms with enough panache to make Avishai Cohen start slapping the body of the nearest double bass to hand - even if the track is cut drastically short. Mostly, you'll hear it in the brilliant closer, “BC”, an uptempo blitz of serenity in seven, bringing closure with bombastic charisma, and breeding contempt from many a brooding composer who would sacrifice their reproductive capabilities just to birth one chune this bloody choice.
It's about now that I'd expect an unwashed jumble of tobacco-smoking denigrators of easy-listening music to pipe up, slurring out sermons about the vapidity that emanates from those who inhale their nicotine all-too-cleanly via doucheflute, and perhaps suggesting that certain branches of the new London jazz scene are overly indebted to the algorithmically-assisted lo-fi leg-up that the likes of
Antiphon so blessedly received. My first rebuttal to these scarecrows is that your opposition here are either extremely studious or vicious procrastinators, so I would choose my next words very carefully. My second rebuttal is that
Variables is not only much more ambitious than its predecessor (sorry
Bring Backs), but also the most forward-thinking album Alfa Mist has put to wax thus far, and an experience far more suited to ruminative cigarettes by candlelight than vape-assisted marathon study sessions.
