Self-released
Release date: 13. 1. 2023
Production: Simon Moraz
Album length: 41.50 min
Genre: Jazz-Rock Fusion
Rating: 10/10
Emil And The Detectives, a Slovenian sextet united in its devotion to the world tenets of jazz-rock fusion, dropped their third studio album, »Remote Proximity«, this January. The band is held together by two old friends (I’d dare say since their high school days): bassist Rastko Zager and keyboardist Dejan Pečenko. They know each other inside out, having played together for years in all sorts of musical formations. That bond is, in a way, sacred to the band’s existence and is actually its creative driveshaft. In 2017 came the more-than-bold studio debut »Agora« (RockLine review), which was packed with creative options for where to go next, and the band cashed in on them with the more-than-excellent follow-up »Sandcastles« in 2020 (RockLine review). Between the two albums you can hear a clear artistic and creative leap, which tells you that Emil and The Detectives are their own musical story, one that doesn’t fuss over style and doesn’t want to cement it. This is a crew that creates music in the glow of the moment’s inspiration and gives itself over to feeling, to intuition and instinct. And that’s the essence of constant change, which keeps pushing the artistic bar upward. Growth. When you look back at the musical road Zager and Pečenko have traveled, with all the experience gathered and the vision they’ve built, that conclusion is no surprise at all. Add up the substance of the previous two albums and you could almost bet that the material on the new one would bring something fresh, different, challenging, and yes, even ‘unusual’.
When you put »Remote Proximity« into the player, you’re struck by how much more sophisticated the arrangements are compared to the last album. Your ear gets ‘jolted awake’ by a noticeably different guitar response, and suddenly the sax has company in the form of a trumpet, which wasn’t there before. The band recently went through a thorough shake-up of the lineup, and the album took shape over a longer stretch of time, which of course was also shaped by the forced p(l)andemic. Pečenko, Zager and saxophonist Zdravko Zimic remain the constants in the revamped sextet, while the newcomers are trumpeter Boris Majcen (so the band swapped percussion for trumpet), drummer Jože Zadravec and, you could say, the ‘Slovenian John McLAughlin’, jazz guitar acrobat and grandmaster Igor Bezget (check out his supersonic ‘knotting’ in the closing River With 2 Springs). All of these musicians are hardcore, seasoned jazz masters, and the expressive range their artistry unleashes is staggering. »Remote Proximity« (you could translate that as ‘distant closeness’) thus brings a new artistic-creative step up the band’s evolutionary ladder. If we can even talk about evolution here. It’s just a moment you catch! Right now. You could see it as the highest form of honestly translating instincts and feelings into musical expression, which is what a musical artist surrenders to. The sextet clearly gets this philosophy of letting go very well, and that’s also the foundation of reaching a distinctive, homegrown voice.
The muted trumpet in Tranquility makes it clear right away that a lot has changed for Emil and the Detectives between 2020 and 2023. While the album opens a bit shyly here, under the dictate of lazy rhythmic brush ‘licking’ (‘brushwork’) that conjures the smoky Chicago cabaret clubs of the 1930s, the next track, Back From Planet Serpo, is the part of the album that fully lays bare the new chemistry between the building blocks of the revamped sextet. With the arrival of trumpet and flugelhorn on the new record, and in combination with the sax, the spirit of bebop is much more intense than on the previous album. Conditionally speaking, that’s the distant, ever-benevolent and always welcome spirit of Miles Davis. Just as striking is the interplay on the front line, represented by Pečenko, Bezget, Zimič and Majcen, which confirms the exceptionally solid and sparkling chemistry of the bonds between them, in tune with the expressive sensibilities of the sextet’s members. And that’s really the decisive thing!
The album speaks to you with organic warmth, alive and lively. In its new shape, the band has developed outstanding chemistry between the building blocks of its sound, and it delivers musical substance of top-tier jazz-rock fusion tightrope walking that never stops impressing. It achieves remarkable flexibility, and the members pass improvisational bits back and forth with a witty, sparkling shine, brilliantly balanced against the thematic structure, so there’s no talk of wacky outbursts of avant-garde fragmentation or ‘free jazz’ variations on the album. With the new record Emil And The Detectives reach even more expressive elasticity, while keeping the listenability at an outstanding level the whole way through. The jazz masters, each in their own domain, always deftly return to the lead motifs that keep the songs compact. So you could say every single track is loosened up by improvisation just the right amount. It’s also worth stressing that the sextet works first and foremost as a band, and when it comes to dosing out the improvised bits, none of the members stands out.
At every step, in every format and every stage of this album’s development, there isn’t a moment that doesn’t shower the listener with interesting musical information. But what tops all those superlatives (described so far in this piece) is the translation of raw, primal feeling. Instinct, too. That’s how the album builds an extraordinary, almost arrogant power in the musical substance itself, which drives you forward and sucks you in. It even gives off a sense of spontaneity, although that’s not really what we’re dealing with. Let’s say instead that the series of unpredictable turns, tricks and finesses Emil and the Detectives develop on »Remote Proximity« keeps this record irresistibly enjoyable to listen to from start to finish. Especially because the crew keeps steering clear of escapes into possible fields of wacky experimentation.
»Remote Proximity« is a new musical chapter for Emil and the Detectives. A new platform for defining the band’s musical ID card. A new artistic level of constant change that runs like a ‘perpetuum mobile’ and recognizes no molds or limits. It’s a fascinating piece of work with which the band has established a new, top-class creative musical sphere, one where they can go on indulging in boundless expressionism, surrendering to it and nurturing it in the future too.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Tranquility
2. Back From Planet Serpo
3. Devided By Zero
4. Fuego Ondulado
5. Dark Matter
6. Ouroboros
7. River With 2 Springs
Lineup:
Rastko Zager – bass guitar
Dejan Pečenko – Kurzweil keyboards, Hammond M3
Zdravko Zimič – saxophone
Igor Bezget – guitar, guitar synthesizer B
Boris Majcen – trumpet, flugelhorn
Jože Zadravec – drums
