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Julie Sassoon

New Life

Babel BDV2662

The 'new life' in question is Julie Sassoon's daughter, Mia, with whom the pianist was pregnant during the making of this album, and to whom it is dedicated.

Appropriately enough, the tone of the five solo pieces the recording contains is alternately contemplative and celebratory, gently insistent musings expressed through often hypnotically repetitive figures slowly gaining vigour and power until they reach rollicking climaxes, or jauntily uplifting themes infused with positive energy.

As anyone who's witnessed a performance by Sassoon will know, she proceeds by setting up a repeated phrase, becoming fascinated by a certain rhythmic or melodic possibility contained within it, then exploring that possibility via the small, subtle displacements of rhythm and changes of texture that are frequently associated with minimalism; she also occasionally sets up a repeated motif and then solos over it in relatively conventional jazz mode, or croons along, humming a single sustained note.

Although occupying the 'classical' end of the solo-piano spectrum, and owing more to, say, Scriabin than to Keith Tippett (as opposed to the free-jazz end occupied by Tippett himself or Howard Riley), Sassoon's absorbing album will intrigue anyone interested in the process of jazz improvisation.