Edrix Puzzle: Coming Of The Moon Dogs

There are precious few records out there that one feels confident in recommending to connoisseurs of cosmic jazz-rockers The Comet Is Coming, but Coming Of The Moon Dogs is one of them. The disc is the first full-length album from Edrix Puzzle, another British band who are stretching the definition of jazz while being audibly across its history.

Edrix Puzzle is a quintet comprising drummer and drum programmer Nathan Curran, bass clarinetist and saxophonist Martin Slattery, acoustic bassist Tom Mason, violinist Darren Berry and percussionist Oli Savill. Curran, Slattery and Savill previously came together in the like-minded Planet Battagon, who prepared the ground for Edrix Puzzle with the 2020 album Nep-Tunia (On The Corner).

Edrix Puzzle's sound is distinct from those of The Comet Is Coming and Planet Battagon in part because of the prominence of acoustic bass and violin. Slattery's use of bass clarinet chimes with The Comet Is Coming's Shabaka Hutchings, who occasionally uses the instrument, but its source is closer to Bennie Maupin in Herbie Hancock's early 1970s Mwandishi sextet. Curran acknowledges Mwandishi as Edrix Puzzle's primary inspiration and, while it would be a misnomer to describe Edrix Puzzle as revivalist, there are also resonances of violinist Michael White's late 1960s electric quartet The Fourth Way and early 1970s electric Miles Davis and Chick Corea's Return to Forever.

While the artwork on Coming Of The Moon Dogs, may suggest something at least borderline dystopian, the reality is otherwise. The music is uplifting, driven by Curran's greasy backbeats and foregrounding the gritty but sonorous lyrcism of Berry's violin and Mason's often-arco bass. There is none of the ugly chromaticism which disfigured Miles Davis's electric music post-In A Silent Way (Columbia, 1969). This is not to say the album will not frighten the horses, but these are likely only to be the horses of the mounted jazz police. It is fervently to be hoped that, should the horses rear, their officers do not suffer undignified falls to the ground.