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Joy Ellis: Peaceful Place
ByPeaceful Place is Ellis's third album, and as we have heard from other musicians in recent months, Covid has had at least one benefit: isolation and lack of gigs can result in to a pleasing reflective quality in the music that we might not otherwise have heard. Practical constraints also focus the mind. Having booked guest players for her previous albums (Binker Golding, James Copus, Rob Luft), this time she has restricted herself to a limited palette. And no singing this time, just piano, double bass and drums. The outcome: the best recording she's made to date.
Ellis writes all her own material, the compositions occupying similar modernist ground to Wasilewski and Meldau, with pleasing echoes of Debussy and Satie, especially on "My Peaceful Place." In keeping with the title, it's all about melody, rippling streams of it, gently propelled by Henrik Jensen's bass and Adam Osmianski's drums. The latter is a specialist in Brazilian music, who knows all about the subtle cross-rhythms and accents that support the main narrative without dominating it. Jensen supplies a bubbling pulse throughout, finding small spaces in which to develop his own ideas.
Another good example of the trio's empathy is the final track "Begin Again," which Ellis starts with a few scattered notes, punctuated by Osmianski's minimalist scrapes and hisses, before setting up a repeated chordal figure supported by Jensen, and then a simple, rhythmical four-note figure for him and Osmianski to carry through as she explores the theme with her own improvisation, finishing the piece off with a gorgeous chiming coda.
Track Listing
My Peaceful Place; Day of Rest; Eat, Sleep, Repeat; Losing; Silver Linings; Cascade; Begin Again
Personnel
Album information
Title: Peaceful Place | Year Released: 2022 | Record Label: Oti-O
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Album Review
Peter Jones
Peaceful Place
Oti-O
Marcin Wasilewski Trio
Joy Ellis
Binker Golding
James Copus
Rob Luft
Henrik Jensen
Adam Osmianski