Gustafsson / McPhee / Håker Flaten / Nilssen-Love: The Thing She Knows...

The Hat Hut and ezz-thetics family of labels is in 2021 just three years shy of its fiftieth anniversary. This is a remarkable, perhaps unique, achievement for an independent company which has concerned itself exclusively with the avant-garde end of jazz and conservatoire music from the get go, and has done so with the highest (for which read costly) production standards.

Perhaps mindful of the coming anniversary, the labels' founder, Werner X. Uehlinger, has since 2019 been reissuing albums on ezz-thetics' Revisited strand by some of the artists who first sparked his love of jazz. Among them are important albums by Albert Ayler—who changed Uehlinger's life when Uehlinger caught him in concert in Germany in 1966—John Coltrane and Archie Shepp, all of them much enhanced by ezz-thetics' family of remastering jedis.

The Thing She Knows... is not actually part of the Revisited series, but it is another trip down memory lane and one of special significance to Hat Hut and ezz-thetics. The album was originally self-released as She Knows... by Swedish / Norwegian trio The Thing in 2001, with the group—tenor and baritone saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love—augmented by American saxophonist and trumpeter Joe McPhee. The connection with Uehlinger goes back to 1974 and the founding of Hat Hat, whose first four albums were released under McPhee's name.

McPhee has contributed a lengthy and interesting liner note to The Thing She Knows..., which ends with the story of how the original album title came about. It transpires that while on the road in the US in 2000, McPhee and The Thing got into a ritual of watching sci-fi horror movies. Among these were Ridley Scott's Alien series starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley. In the second movie, Aliens, Ripley "adopts" and protects a young girl named Newt who tells Ripley, "My mommy always said there were no real monsters but there are." A word to the wise, concludes McPhee: "She Knows." (The new album's cover shows a photo of a skull which spookily resembles that of the monsters in Scott's movies).

Horror movies have long provided creative stimuli for jazz musicians. Who can forget French pianist Alain Goraguer's score for Michel Gast's masterpiece J'Irai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes a.k.a. I Spit On Your Graves (Philips, 1959) featuring trumpeter Roger Guerin and bassist Pierre Michelot? Or Italian composer Piero Umiliani's score for Franco Rossi's classic Smog (RCA Victor, 1962), featuring trumpeter Chet Baker? Indeed, who can remember them?

Gustafsson contributes a brief sleeve note to The Thing She Knows... explaining the origin of the band's name. We learn that the first choice was Trans Love Airways, after the Don Cherry composition, but that the name was already taken by "a snotty indie group in Gothenburg." So the trio settled on The Thing, after another Cherry piece.

Cherry's "The Thing" is included on this album, along with PJ Harvey's "To Bring You My Love," Ornette Coleman's "Kathelin Gray," the traditional "Going Home," Frank Lowe's "For Real," McPhee's "Old Eyes" and James Blood Ulmer's "Baby Talk" (which the band revisited with Ulmer himself on Baby Talk: Live At Molde International Jazz Festival 2015, self-released in 2017). Just under an hour of tightly focused, if paradoxical, wildness .