Some musical encounters are described as “cross-cultural collaborations” with the sort of solemnity usually reserved for diplomatic summits. A Norwegian free-jazz drummer discovers a traditional Japanese melody, invites a legendary Japanese saxophonist into his large ensemble, and the resulting record is duly presented as a meeting between traditions. Thankfully, "Hohai-Bushi" is far too unruly to behave like a cultural conference.

The title refers to a traditional song from Tsugaru, in Aomori, northern Japan. The word "bushi" belongs to the broad vocabulary of Japanese song titles, while "hohai" is essentially a vocable, a sound rather than a word with a precise semantic meaning. In the traditional form, it functions as a high-register refrain. It is a small but significant detail, because the title itself already points towards something that becomes central to this recording: music does not always need to explain itself in order to carry meaning. Sometimes a sound survives precisely because it is a sound.

Paal Nilssen-Love encountered the song while investigating Tsugaru-Shamisen during the pandemic. Rather than treating the discovery as a source of exotic seasoning for Large Unit, he went deeper into the material and eventually worked on a transcription with Akira Sakata. The melody became the starting point for a new composition, first performed during Large Unit's tenth-anniversary festival in 2023 and subsequently recorded at Tøyen Kirke in Oslo in June 2025.

This history matters because "Hohai-Bushi" does not sound like a Norwegian ensemble attempting to imitate Japanese music. Nor does it sound like a Japanese musician temporarily visiting Scandinavian free jazz. The traditional melody is treated as a living object: something that can be carried elsewhere without remaining unchanged. And carrying it elsewhere turns out to require quite a lot of luggage.

Large Unit is here a formidable fifteen-person organism. Around Sakata's alto saxophone, Bb clarinet and voice are gathered alto and tenor saxophones, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, trumpet, trombone, tuba, accordion, electric guitar, two double basses, shakuhachi, percussion, gongs and two drum kits. It is the kind of ensemble that makes the concept of “small ensemble subtlety” sound faintly ridiculous. Yet Nilssen-Love does not immediately unleash the whole apparatus.

The opening develops with remarkable patience. Percussion establishes a pulse that feels more ceremonial than propulsive, while individual instrumental colours gradually emerge from the collective sound. There is an almost geological quality to the process. The music seems to accumulate rather than advance, each layer settling over the previous one until the original melody is no longer simply something being played but something around which the entire performance has begun to orbit.

This is where Nilssen-Love's evolution as a bandleader becomes particularly evident. The drummer who has spent decades associated with some of improvised music's most explosive encounters understands that volume is only one form of intensity. Large Unit can certainly produce enormous masses of sound, but "Hohai-Bushi" is interested in the pressure created by anticipation, repetition and gradual transformation.

The effect can be surprisingly majestic. Not “majestic” in the pompous sense. There are no trumpets announcing the arrival of civilisation. Instead, the ensemble moves with a strange, deliberate gravity, sometimes sounding like a procession whose destination nobody has disclosed. A recent listener's account similarly emphasises the piece's massive, slow-moving character, its tendency to proceed through fragments and persistence rather than constant climactic escalation. That patience also gives Sakata room to occupy the music rather than merely decorate it.

Akira Sakata has been one of the most distinctive figures in Japanese free improvisation for more than half a century. His history reaches back to the Yamashita Trio and the explosive development of Japanese free jazz in the 1970s, while his later career has repeatedly brought him into contact with younger musicians and scenes far beyond conventional jazz. His relationship with Nilssen-Love is already substantial: the two have worked together in Arashi, alongside Johan Berthling, since 2013, accumulating extensive touring experience and several recordings. There is therefore no sense here of an elderly legend being wheeled onstage for ceremonial purposes.

Sakata sounds completely embedded in the piece. His alto can be abrasive, vocal, serrated, almost animalistic; his clarinet introduces a different kind of instability; and his voice is eventually given an even more exposed role. The distinction is important. Sakata does not simply improvise over Large Unit. He changes the emotional centre of the performance.

The traditional "Hohai-Bushi" melody is especially interesting in this context because its vocal refrain is semantically empty. The music begins, in a sense, with something that means nothing literally and proceeds to generate an extraordinary amount of meaning around it. That is one of the record's quiet paradoxes. The more Large Unit expands the material, the less important the question of literal translation becomes. Melody turns into gesture; gesture becomes rhythm; rhythm becomes collective physicality. The song is no longer something the listener needs to “understand” in linguistic terms. It has become a structural memory.

The church recording helps enormously. Tøyen Kirke provides a natural reverberation that allows Sakata's voice and instrumental lines to hang in the air rather than being immediately swallowed by the ensemble. The acoustic does not merely make the record sound larger. It gives the music a sense of duration, as though every sound has to pass through a little more space before it reaches the listener. Then, around the middle of the performance, something unexpected happens.

The giant ensemble gives way to Sakata reciting Shuntaro Tanikawa's "What the Dead Man Left Behind", a poem written during the Vietnam War. The text deals with the residue of death, with what remains when a human being does not: family, absence, memory, the painfully ordinary consequences of violence. Sakata has performed the poem in other contexts, including with Arashi, so its appearance here is not an arbitrary literary embellishment. Within "Hohai-Bushi", however, its placement is devastating. After the accumulated weight of the ensemble, the spoken voice suddenly becomes enough. No grand orchestral underline is necessary. No tasteful cinematic sadness is required. The music understands something that film composers occasionally forget: silence can be considerably more intimidating than a string section.

The poem also changes the meaning of the preceding music. Until that point, the recording might be heard primarily as an adventurous reworking of traditional material. Afterwards, the collective sound acquires another dimension. The music is no longer simply negotiating geography and musical language. It is carrying memory, and with it the awareness that traditions are not abstract things. They are transmitted by people, and people disappear. This gives the performance a political dimension without turning it into political theatre.

Nilssen-Love has never been particularly interested in making Large Unit polite. But here the radicalism is not merely sonic. It lies in allowing very different histories to coexist without flattening them into a generic “world music” product. The Japanese folk source remains recognisable as a source, Sakata remains unmistakably himself, and Large Unit remains the unruly Scandinavian collective it has become over the years.

The resulting music does not ask these elements to agree. It asks them to listen to one another. And that distinction saves the whole enterprise from the usual traps of musical fusion. There is no attempt to create a synthetic Esperanto in which everybody plays an approximation of everybody else's tradition. Instead, identities remain visible. The tension between them becomes productive.

At several points the ensemble becomes almost overwhelmingly dense. Brass, reeds, percussion and low frequencies accumulate until the original song seems buried beneath the machinery. But that burial is temporary. Fragments of the melody keep resurfacing, sometimes transformed almost beyond recognition. It is as though the traditional song has been thrown into a river and keeps appearing downstream in altered shapes.

The music is not particularly interested in neat resolutions. That becomes even clearer when Sakata eventually closes the performance alone, playing "Akatombo" by Kosaku Yamada. The contrast is extraordinary. After nearly an hour of collective sound, the final gesture is solitary. The ensemble has spent most of the record demonstrating how much can happen when many musicians occupy the same space; the ending demonstrates how little is actually required.

A single voice, a single instrument, a melody. And suddenly the enormous apparatus disappears.

The choice of "Akatombo" is more than a convenient encore. It creates a second point of contact with Japanese musical memory, allowing Sakata to leave the ensemble behind and return to something intimate and recognisable. The record's scale contracts dramatically, and the listener is left with the impression that the entire preceding performance has been an elaborate route toward this moment of simplicity.

What ultimately makes Hohai-Bushi so convincing is that Nilssen-Love never tries to resolve the contradiction at its centre. The traditional melody remains there, but it is continually forced into unfamiliar surroundings. Sakata brings with him decades of Japanese musical history, while Large Unit subjects the material to its own restless vocabulary. Neither side disappears into the other.

The result is not a musical compromise but a genuine encounter. Sometimes the melody is clearly audible; elsewhere it seems to dissolve into brass, reeds, percussion and low frequencies, only to return later in another shape. The composition breathes through these changes rather than treating them as separate episodes. What begins as a song gradually becomes the organising principle of an entire sonic environment.

That makes the final Akatombo especially effective. After fifty minutes in which fifteen musicians have occupied the acoustic space, Sakata is suddenly alone. There is no need for a final explosion, no grand collective statement, no obligatory crescendo to remind us that this is experimental music and therefore presumably somebody ought to set fire to the furniture. Instead, there is a melody. It is an unusually human ending to a record that has spent much of its duration exploring the possibilities of collective sound. Sakata's solo does not negate what came before it. It puts it into perspective. The huge ensemble, the dense improvisations, the shifts of texture and the moments of near-overwhelming intensity have all led back to something extraordinarily simple: one musician playing a tune.

Perhaps that is the most interesting thing Nilssen-Love has done with Hohai-Bushi. He has taken a traditional song without reducing it to an artefact, opened it up to an ensemble without burying it, and allowed Akira Sakata to inhabit it without turning the collaboration into an exercise in nostalgia.

The music travels a long way, but it never loses sight of where it started.

And when the journey is finally over, it does not leave us with a monument. It leaves us with Sakata, alone, playing Akatombo in the reverberation of a church.

That is enough.

More than enough, actually.

There is something wonderfully unreasonable about calling a 25-piece ensemble an “Extra Large Unit”. At that scale, the adjective starts to lose its meaning and the noun becomes almost comic: this is less a band than a temporary ecosystem, complete with percussion, winds, strings, accordion, harp, voice, four dancers and, eventually, a small invasion of ping-pong balls. Civilization has always had a peculiar talent for organizing enormous quantities of people in order to make something happen, and Paal Nilssen-Love's "Steam Waterfall" turns that impulse into a remarkably coherent musical experiment.

Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in August 2022, the 75-minute piece expands the Large Unit into its most populous incarnation yet. But numbers are ultimately the least interesting thing about it. What matters is the way Nilssen-Love uses such an unwieldy organism without trying to tame it. Written passages, graphic scores, conceptual instructions, individual solos and collective improvisations coexist without producing the dreadful sensation of a committee meeting disguised as contemporary music.

The opening is particularly revealing. Before the music properly announces itself, we hear the audience entering the space. It is a small gesture, but it immediately unsettles the conventional boundary between performance and preparation. The concert is already happening because people are arriving to hear it. The musicians are not yet performing, but the social machinery surrounding performance has begun. From there, "Steam Waterfall" proceeds less like a conventional composition than like a series of doors opening onto one another.

Nilssen-Love's central concern is precisely this instability: where does a concert begin, and where does it finish? What constitutes a piece when the composer establishes some conditions but leaves considerable responsibility to the performers? These questions could easily produce the kind of solemn theoretical exercise that makes audiences suddenly develop an urgent interest in the emergency exit. Instead, "Steam Waterfall" keeps translating its ideas into physical sound.

The sheer variety of the instrumentation helps. Four tubas alone can alter the gravitational field of an ensemble; several saxophones and clarinets create shifting masses of breath and pressure; harp, accordion, guitar, cello and viola introduce entirely different densities. Then there are multiple percussionists, including Korean traditional drums and gongs, alongside the enormous rhythmic apparatus of Nilssen-Love himself. Rather than presenting these elements as a catalogue of timbres, the piece lets them collide, separate, overlap and disappear. The result is frequently chaotic, but rarely arbitrary. That distinction is crucial. Chaos here is not the absence of structure. It is what structure looks like after being handed over to twenty-five musicians and four dancers and told to behave itself.

Nilssen-Love has long demonstrated an unusual ability to make improvisation feel collective rather than merely simultaneous. His Large Unit project, begun in 2013, has become a particularly fertile laboratory for this approach, bringing together musicians from different generations and musical backgrounds. "Steam Waterfall" pushes that principle further by incorporating younger players he encountered through workshops and teaching. The ensemble therefore becomes partly an orchestra, partly an improvisational network, and partly an experiment in musical transmission.

There is also a refreshing physicality to the recording. One can almost imagine the stage as an unstable map, with sounds appearing in different zones and musical groups forming temporary alliances before dissolving again. The four dancers are not ornamental additions but part of the larger investigation into movement, coordination and collective action. By the end, when 100 ping-pong balls are thrown across the stage, the distinction between musical score and event becomes deliciously ridiculous. The balls bounce on instruments and floor, glasses are apparently sacrificed to the occasion, and suddenly the supposedly abstract question of what a concert is has acquired a very concrete answer: sometimes it involves trying not to get hit by a small white sphere.

Yet the humour does not trivialize the music. Quite the opposite. It exposes the artificiality of the solemn concert ritual. A performance can contain carefully organized material, improvisation, physical movement, accidents, audience behaviour and sheer nonsense, and all of those things can belong to the same artistic space.

The recording itself benefits from being approached as an event rather than a conventional studio album. There is a sense of architecture continually being assembled and dismantled. Large blocks of ensemble sound can give way to smaller configurations, rhythmic density can evaporate into sparse gestures, and individual voices briefly emerge from the mass before being swallowed back into it. The piece breathes according to its own strange metabolism. This is where the title becomes apt. A waterfall suggests continuity and force, while steam suggests transformation, diffusion and instability. "Steam Waterfall" combines both conditions: a large body of sound constantly changing state. Nothing stays fixed for long, but neither does everything simply dissolve.

The most impressive achievement is perhaps that Nilssen-Love never seems particularly interested in demonstrating how clever the concept is. The concept serves the music rather than the reverse. The questions about authorship, duration and audience are embedded in the performance instead of being placed above it like an instruction manual. And that makes the final absurdity of those ping-pong balls strangely appropriate. After 75 minutes of negotiating composition, improvisation, collective responsibility and the boundaries of the concert, the ensemble arrives at something wonderfully primitive: objects bouncing around a room while 25 musicians and four dancers participate in the commotion. The grand philosophical question ends with physics.

Human beings, after all, remain remarkably complicated creatures for organisms that can be entertained by balls bouncing on a floor.
"Steam Waterfall" is therefore not simply an enormous improvisational performance. It is a study in collective attention, a composition that keeps asking how much control music actually needs before it becomes alive. Its answer is neither total freedom nor rigid authorship, but a precarious middle ground where instructions, intuition, accident and personality continually negotiate with one another.

The music survives that negotiation because the musicians listen. That may sound like a modest conclusion, but in a world increasingly obsessed with control, automation and predetermined outcomes, it has considerable weight. Here, structure creates the conditions for uncertainty, and uncertainty becomes the source of vitality.

The Unit is large. The music is larger still. And somewhere underneath it all, probably, a ping-pong ball is still bouncing.

Across its brief nine-minute span, Oblivion functions as a miniature atlas of disappearance. Its three titles evoke territories, yet the release seems more interested in private territories within than in geography without. The title track opens a blissful expanse where the self can drift, relieved of the obligation to explain itself. Glorious electronic washes breathe through chordal imaginations, exchanging oxygen with elusive hints of melody. Every sound appears softened by immeasurable distance, carrying the strange intimacy of something remembered before it has occurred, a reverse déjà vu of the mind. Hozuki and Cornwave suspend the listener inside a radiant parenthesis, a place where existence becomes sufficient unto itself.

“Tamriel” introduces a more arpeggiated current, turning the ear into a filmic mechanism powered by nostalgia’s combustible residue. Notes flicker forward while shedding the certainty of survival. The piece moves, yet its destination remains concealed behind the very momentum that promises to reveal it. Human progress becomes lightning immobilized within an invisible archive, its violence preserved as a mere hint of illumination. This tension gives the track its quiet metaphysical charge. Every pulse suggests that movement may be another form of stasis, merely viewed from within the machine of which we are all a part.

“Winterhold” concludes the release with a depth of stillness so encompassing that it seems to cradle the listener from the inside out. The music sinks beneath ordinary duration, entering mineral-rich sediment where seconds accumulate without passing. Yet darkness gathers beneath the beauty. Trauma unfolds petal by scarred petal, awakening gradually to the terrible delicacy of its own construction. Solace here does not require brightness or public proof.

That may be Oblivion’s most profound gesture. Forgetting emerges as a temporary calibration of mercy, a room built inside the wound where consciousness can enjoy its deformities and sit unrecognized.

There is a peculiar cruelty in making an album about self-doubt while simultaneously having to become more visible inside it. Loraine James solves the problem in the least convenient way possible: she puts her own voice further forward, pares the production down, and allows the little electronic splinters around it to remain exposed. No giant wall of sound to hide behind. No particularly elaborate smoke machine. Just voice, rhythm, glitches, awkward silences and the uncomfortable business of being oneself in public.

"Detached From The Rest Of You" is therefore both a retreat and an act of exposure. It emerged from a period in which James was questioning her confidence and her direction, but the resulting record is not a collapse. It is more like someone taking apart the machinery of their own hesitation and discovering that some of the components still work.

James has spent much of her career occupying the unstable border between experimental electronics, club music, ambient textures, R&B and fractured pop. Here, the emphasis shifts noticeably towards the latter. Her collaboration with Anysia Kym on the "Clandestine" EP seems to have opened another door: the songs on "Detached From The Rest Of You" are more compact, more deliberately shaped, and more willing to behave like songs. Yet James does not suddenly become a conventional pop producer. Humanity has apparently survived without needing that particular tragedy.

Instead, she takes the aesthetic of early-2000s clicks-and-cuts and puts a pulse inside it.

The opening "A Long Distance Call" establishes the method beautifully. Tiny digital disturbances, clipped rhythms and isolated electronic details create an environment that feels technologically precise but emotionally unstable. The production seems to be constantly checking whether the connection is still alive. This tension between mechanical fragmentation and human vulnerability becomes one of the album's central ideas.

On "The Book Of Self Doubt", James turns inward more explicitly. The music is skeletal, leaving enormous amounts of space around her voice. That space matters. Earlier versions of electronic introspection could make alienation sound glamorous, like being alone in a futuristic apartment with excellent speakers. James is interested in something less cinematic: the banal, repetitive, mildly embarrassing experience of doubting yourself while still having to get through the day.

The title "Detached From The Rest Of You" consequently works on several levels. There is social distance, emotional distance, creative uncertainty and the peculiar detachment produced by contemporary technology. Screens promise connection while repeatedly reminding us that a mediated relationship is still mediated. James's electronics embody that contradiction rather elegantly: everything is connected, but nothing quite touches.

Then the guests begin arriving.

Sydney Spann brings "In a Rut" closer to R&B without dissolving James's fractured rhythmic language. Anysia Kym's presence on "Score" provides another glimpse of James allowing the song form to breathe rather than treating it as something that needs to be escaped. Tirzah's appearance on "Habits and Patterns" is particularly effective, with sparse piano and understated electronic detail creating a strangely domestic atmosphere. It feels intimate without becoming sentimental, which is a much harder trick than it looks.

Miho Hatori's "Flatline" is perhaps the most conceptually amusing of these collaborations. A song about emotional uncertainty in relation to artificial intelligence is almost painfully appropriate for 2026, when humanity has managed to make the question "is this love?" applicable to both machines and several dating apps. Hatori's processed vocals drift through the track while James's production keeps everything in a state of unstable suspension. The technology is seductive, but also faintly ridiculous. The machine can imitate intimacy; the human being remains stuck trying to work out whether imitation is enough.

"Peak Again", featuring Alan Sparhawk, introduces another texture. Sparhawk's weathered voice contrasts with James's more fragile vocal presence, while live drums disturb the electronic grid. The result is less a guest appearance than a meeting between two different kinds of emotional wear. The track's melancholy is never allowed to settle into comfortable indie-rock territory because James keeps pulling the rhythm sideways.

That sideways movement is important throughout the album.

Even when James approaches recognisable forms, something keeps slipping. "Seems Like I" and "Wish I Was Like U" are miniature pieces, almost fragments of thought caught before they have had time to become songs. Their brevity makes them feel less like interludes than intrusive thoughts. They arrive, occupy the room for a moment, and disappear before anyone can politely ask them to explain themselves.

Then "Ending Us All", with Le3 bLACK and Fyn Dobson, injects a sharper physicality. The percussion becomes more animated, the electronic layers more forceful, and the track's jazz-inflected movement gives the album one of its most kinetic moments. It is a useful reminder that James has not abandoned her relationship with rhythm. She has simply stopped treating the dancefloor as the only place where rhythm can have consequences.

The most revealing track may be "Forever Still (Steel)". It begins with a restless, almost percussive nervous system before gradually changing shape. James raps, reflects on anger and then allows the track to break apart into warped harmonies and strange loops. The title's play between "still" and "steel" captures much of the album's psychology: vulnerability is not necessarily softness. Sometimes remaining intact requires becoming harder. And this is where the record's apparent contradiction becomes its strength.

An album about confidence might be expected to sound triumphant. "Detached From The Rest Of You" does not. It sounds hesitant, intimate, occasionally irritated, sometimes almost exhausted. Yet the very decision to put those feelings into the foreground becomes an act of control. James does not overcome self-doubt by pretending it has disappeared. She gives it a microphone and then edits the resulting mess into twelve precise tracks.

The production is crucial to that process. There is remarkably little excess. Glitches click at the edges, synthesizers provide small patches of colour, rhythms appear and vanish, and silence becomes an active compositional element. James draws attention not only to sounds but to the gaps between them. Her fascination with the precise, almost clinical surfaces associated with Aoki Takamasa and Ryoji Ikeda is transformed into something much warmer. The digital debris is no longer evidence of machines malfunctioning. It becomes the nervous system of a person thinking too much.

That makes the album's apparent "pop" turn rather more interesting than the label suggests. These are songs, certainly, but they are songs that retain the awkwardness of James's experimental instincts. She has not domesticated the glitches. She has invited them into the house and given them something to do.

The final "See Through" provides the appropriate resolution. Rhodes-like shimmer, guitar, distortion and electronic residue gather around James's voice, but the atmosphere is lighter than at the beginning. There is no grand victory parade. No motivational speech appears from the ceiling. The achievement is smaller and therefore more convincing: she sounds capable of looking at herself without immediately looking away.

"Detached From The Rest Of You" is ultimately about reducing the distance between the person making the music and the person listening to it. James strips away some of the protective abstraction that characterised parts of her earlier work and discovers that directness does not necessarily mean simplicity. A clipped beat can still contain anxiety. A pop structure can still behave strangely. A voice can be exposed without becoming nakedly sentimental.

The most impressive thing here is not that Loraine James has made her most accessible record. It is that she has made accessibility itself feel experimental.

She takes the vocabulary of digital fragmentation, self-consciousness, fractured club music and intimate songwriting and asks them to coexist without settling their differences. They never completely do. That unresolved friction is precisely what keeps the album alive.
For someone who began from a position of uncertainty, "Detached From The Rest Of You" ends up sounding less like a declaration of confidence than something subtler: "confidence as the willingness to remain unfinished in public".

Human beings, against all available evidence, occasionally manage it.

There is something almost impudent about choosing Thelonious Monk as the next subject of a project that has spent years excavating the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Monk's compositions have already been played, dissected, modernised, deconstructed, reconstructed, academicised, sanctified and probably discussed at length by people wearing particularly serious-looking glasses. The repertoire is so thoroughly canonised that approaching it without either reverence or irony would seem almost impossible. Ahmed wisely chooses neither.

The connection is nevertheless far from arbitrary. Ahmed Abdul-Malik was a member of Monk's late-1950s quartets, and the two musicians shared an interest in treating musical time as something considerably less obedient than the straight line Western notation tends to suggest. For Ahmed, this becomes more than a historical footnote. It is a passageway. After six albums devoted to Abdul-Malik's compositions, the quartet of Pat Thomas, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal and Seymour Wright turns toward Monk not to preserve his music, but to see how much further its peculiar logic can travel. The answer, over roughly two hours, is: quite a long way.

The opening "Bye-Ya / Epistrophy" initially gives the listener something resembling a handrail. There is rhythm, there is melody, there is the unmistakable crooked architecture of Monk. Then the quartet begins pulling individual elements apart. Thomas's piano becomes increasingly physical, Grip's bass both anchors and destabilises the proceedings, Gerbal turns rhythm into an almost muscular continuum, while Wright's alto saxophone repeatedly approaches the melodic material only to fracture it, stretch it or abandon it altogether. The tune is not forgotten. It is subjected to pressure.

That distinction is crucial. "Play Monk" is not really an album of covers. It is closer to an archaeological experiment in which the quartet takes Monk's compositions apart to discover what kind of machinery is hidden inside them. A melody becomes a fragment; a fragment becomes a rhythm; the rhythm becomes an obsession; the obsession becomes texture. Then, occasionally, some recognisable feature reappears like an old acquaintance who has spent the intervening years behaving strangely.

"Friday Thirteenth" is a particularly revealing example. Its characteristic melodic contour remains somewhere underneath the surface, but repetition gradually changes its psychological function. What begins as a theme becomes a kind of gravitational field. Thomas keeps returning to the material while Wright approaches it from increasingly oblique angles, and Grip and Gerbal generate a restless physicality underneath. The effect is hypnotic without becoming comfortable. This is music that can repeat without remaining still, which is rather more difficult than it sounds.

Then comes "Round Midnight", and here the quartet performs perhaps its most audacious act of transformation. One of the most familiar compositions in the jazz repertoire is stretched across more than twenty-five minutes, but duration is only part of the story. The famous nocturnal atmosphere is not simply amplified. It is dissolved. What remains is a darker investigation of space, touch and collective timing, with the quartet gradually reducing the composition to unstable particles. Monk's shadow remains visible, but the portrait has been left out in the rain.

The second disc pushes the process even further. "Epistrophy" acts almost like a compressed laboratory experiment before "Evidence" expands the same principle into nearly half an hour. Here the quartet's collective method becomes especially apparent. There is remarkably little sense of four musicians waiting for their turn. Instead, the music behaves as a single organism with four nervous systems, constantly adjusting its balance.

That collective quality is one of Ahmed's most interesting characteristics. These musicians are not simply impressive improvisers placed in the same room. Their playing often seems to operate according to a shared physical intuition. Repetition, density and minute alterations become structural tools. A gesture may be repeated enough times to lose its original identity, only to acquire another one through persistence. The music consequently feels less like a sequence of solos than like an argument conducted by four people who have forgotten that arguments are supposed to end.

And yet there is humour here, too. Monk's music has always possessed an impish relationship with seriousness, and Ahmed retain something of that crooked grin. The quartet can become ferocious, but never entirely solemn. Even at its densest, the music contains an awareness that absurdity is one of the most useful weapons available to experimental art. You can dismantle a canon without pretending that you have transcended it.

This is particularly evident in the relationship between Pat Thomas and Seymour Wright. Thomas has a wonderfully percussive approach to the piano, turning individual notes and clusters into physical objects rather than merely harmonic information. Wright, meanwhile, seems perfectly happy to treat the alto saxophone as both melodic instrument and malfunctioning machine. Their exchanges are not conventional conversations. They resemble two people repeatedly interrupting one another until, somehow, a third language emerges.

Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal provide the necessary instability beneath them. Grip's bass is rarely content simply to mark harmonic territory, while Gerbal's drumming supplies propulsion without behaving like conventional accompaniment. Their rhythm can tighten, accelerate, fragment or become almost ritualistic. The result is music that often seems to be moving extremely quickly while remaining trapped inside a very small temporal space.

"Evidence", appropriately, becomes one of the album's most extreme propositions. The original composition is treated not as something that needs to be faithfully represented but as material capable of surviving radical surgery. The quartet finds a small number of gestures and keeps worrying them until they become something else. There is aggression here, but also discipline. Chaos is permitted to enter the room, provided it fills in the paperwork first.

The closing "Oska T" continues this temporal distortion, leaving the album suspended between recognition and abstraction. By this stage, the listener has learned the peculiar grammar of "Play Monk": don't expect development in the conventional sense; expect mutation. Don't wait for the theme to return unchanged; notice what has happened to it while you weren't looking.

There is a larger idea behind all this. Ahmed have spent years looking backward in order to move forward. Their project with Abdul-Malik was already an attempt to recover a neglected modernist possibility from the past and activate it in the present. Turning toward Monk might initially seem like a move in the opposite direction, toward a composer whose place in jazz history is already beyond dispute. But the quartet's real interest is not historical correction. It is historical friction.

Monk becomes a set of tools rather than a monument. That is why "Play Monk" works. The album doesn't ask whether Monk's compositions can still sound radical in 2026. It asks a more interesting question: what happens when musicians who have spent years developing a language of repetition, rupture and collective improvisation put that language inside Monk's already unstable structures?

The answer is neither tribute nor desecration. It is continuation. The past is taken apart, shaken vigorously, and returned with several important pieces apparently missing. Human civilisation has survived worse.