Dock in Absolute: [Re]Flekt

I wonder if I'd get away with it? An old friend was famous for his ability to turn out newspaper columns at lightning speed and with no notice, often after a generous lunch that had stretched on until near deadline time. He'd gruffly concede that yes, that's what they paid him for, yank out a few sheets of typing paper and without so much as a musing glance upwards, start pounding the keys. Ten, fifteen minutes later, the sub-editors were desperately trying to find something to fault in the 2000 words he had rattled out. I asked him the secret once. "Oh, it was one they ran months ago. I just messed around with it a bit."

I've written a couple of liner notes for the splendid Dock In Absolute and I'm sorely tempted to dig them out and change a few adjectives. After all, you might ask, isn't that what jazz musicians do, too? It's sometimes sarcastically asked of certain players you haven't seen for a while if they're still playing the same solo. A few have been getting by on the same solo for what seems like decades. Even Louis Armstrong in his later days had his features pretty much off by heart.

Originality isn't always the highest value in art, though we value freshness as much as we do experience. Originality used to be considered a kind of eccentricity. The essence of good art was how close it came to the classics. Whichever way you take it, Dock In Absolute are winning. The new work on [RE]FLEKT is undoubtedly fresh and original. If it was a retread of their 2019 album Unlikely it would indeed be tempting to use the same notes, and just change a few of the track titles. But Jean-Philippe Koch, Arne Wiegand and Victor Kraus don't work that way. Far from having a settled style or a manner that would allow you to identify them from the opening measures, they have the happy knack of making every song sound as if the band was formed specifically to play it. That's true from the opening "Heartbeat" to the end of the set, and while most of the material is written by Koch, it wouldn't work without the firmly musical support he gets from his fellow trio members.

The impression here—again—is of a revolving kaleidoscope of melodic ideas, thrown out in brighter and quieter colours by turns, limpidly romantic one moment, energised with the strut of rock the next. The word "progressive" comes to mind, but it has some unfortunate connotations, certainly in the rock world: triple albums, Persian carpets on stage, Spinal Tap backdrops. And yet the music is progressive in that it seems to reach a higher and more satisfying level of organisation each time. I can say with sincerity that I always feel better—more focused, maybe more optimistic, determined to do better—every time I hear a Dock In Absolute track or album. If they could bottle that, they'd make a fortune. But they make jazz records, not snake oil, and sadly, there's never a fortune to be made from that.

Originality we prize, but we also value indications that the art we are enjoying has some ties to the past. One can certainly suggest some parallels between Dock In Absolute and a select few of the more successful contemporary piano trios. It's harder to connect them to similar groups even of the relatively recent past. There is something of Keith Jarrett's melodic compression, something of Bill Evans' unnoted variability of tone and much of Paul Bley's insistence that the piano trio, like the Trinity itself, was a mysterious dynamism of identities and forces, with every element held in energetic relation to every other. You will, at the simplest level, be listening to the bassist and the drummer just as much as the pianist, and you'll find you take in whole songs rather than following a "line" through the music.

Which is all well and good, but with a deadline looming I have to find something to say about them now...