Since its founding by drummer Federico Ughi in 2000, 577 Records has put out, as of this writing, 231 albums, an average of just under ten a year, making it not only a peer among jazz record labels in general, few of which release more, but one of the most prolific of those imprints devoted specifically to avant garde and improvised jazz. And while much of its catalogue is devoted to documenting the New York scene(s), it has expanded its reach internationally.
One such figure in the veteran English drummer Mark Sanders, now in his fifth career decade. Towards The Flame, Vol. 2 is his eighth appearance on 577 and the second release by The Flame, a trio completed by two much younger Black musicians, pianist Robert Mitchell (who put out his own solo date for 577 earlier in 2024) and bassist Neil Charles.
The album, recorded live at the linchpin London club Café OTO (the first portion released as Vol. 1), begins with Mitchell reciting a poem for the work his nurse mother did in the U.K.'s National Health Service, ghostly percussion floating in the background, then moving into the instrumental improvisation "All Across The Spirit Prism" after about five minutes. The trio employ a jittery beauty, metricality implied, hierarchy dispensed with, development counterintuitive, as the music gets sparser and more abstract. Mitchell has a classical player's touch married to the vision of a cerebral jazz player. During its nearly 15-minute duration, it refracts in the spirit of its titular polyhedron, a spectrum revealed as it increases in speed and density.
You can hear the group mature in real time with the four parts of "Spark Of The Catalyst", pushing one another, while the (presumably) closing "Be Kind (Through It All)" begins with a slowness of not wanting to end yet becomes more insistent and celebratory as a final convocation.
"Britprovising" is a simplification of non-idiomatic free English music, implying a prevalence of texture over harmony. There may be a touch of that here but also quite a bit more. That this was The Flame's debut performance augurs future conflagrations.
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