(Hubro, Avant-Garde Jazz, Experimental, Jazz-Rock) [WEB] Moster! - States of Minds - 2018 [2CD], FLAC (tracks), lossless

The shock of the new meets old-school synths, free-form rock, gutbucket blues and harmolodic funk in sax master Kjetil Møster’s eponymous group’s incredibly various, genre-defying new studio album. Møster!’s latest edition is a Norwegian supergroup featuring Motorpsycho guitarist Hans Magnus Ryan (aka Snah), one-time Motorpsycho and Grand General drummer Kenneth Kapstad, Nikolai Huengsle (of The National Bank, Elephant 9, Big Bang and Needlepoint) on electric bass and electronics, plus legendary studio-boffin Jorgen Træen, who also acts as engineer, on modular synths and lap steel guitar. Kjetil Møster plays sax, clarinet, electronics and percussion.
‘States of Minds’ is a landmark project: a thrillingly exciting double album of two LPs conceived on a grand scale whose contents – including both group improvisations/spontaneous compositions and themes written by one or two of the contributors alone – can sound at times like a completely new form of music only minimally indebted to the past, and at others deeply historical. Within a governing context of full-on, often challenging ensemble jams much closer to experimental rock than to conventional notions of what constitutes ‘jazz’, however broadly defined, we can still hear familiar echoes: of the wounded-animal saxophone cries of Duke Ellington’s ‘jungle music’ or the bar-walking bragodoccio associated with the kind of Texas combos once played in by Ornette Coleman, and the ’tough tenor’ tradition that passed from Coleman Hawkins to John Coltrane to Albert Ayler (and thence, perhaps, to Moster, who has talked of wanting the group that carries his name to “place the artistic style and intensity of his hero John Coltrane in a modern context”).
As well as jazz, we can also recognise in ’States of Minds’ the form and metre of trance-inducing blues and boogie of the type we might find in the ‘primitive’ electric blues of RL Burnside, say, or the post-modern gloss on the form practiced by harmolodic bluesman (and occasional Ornette-sideman) James ’Blood’ Ulmer. From there, it’s easy to hear another sonic link in the chain of influences, to the kind of heroic axe-man flourishes we encounter in the lineage of out-there guitar bands from Cream to Sonic Youth. (Indeed, there’s a story that Cream was expressly formed to echo in rock and blues what Ornette Coleman represented in jazz, after Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were inspired by seeing the Coleman trio at Fairfield Halls in Croydon, London in 1965. Tellingly, neither of them thought to inform Eric Clapton that they had cast him as Ornette.)
And yet ‘States of Minds’ is such a rich mix of influences, antecedents and original experimental interventions that all these echoes account for only part of its promiscuous, genre-hopping style. There are also thoughtful electronic interludes featuring Jorgen Traeen’s modular synthesisers; furiously microtonal slide guitar or lap steel wig-outs, as well as more stately bottleneck-blues melodies that can recall Ry Cooder’s soundtrack themes for ’Southern Comfort’ or ‘Paris, Texas.’ There’s even a slightly poppy, beautifully-poised mid-tempo number where Kjetil Møster’s sax sounds as emotionally pliant as any great-tradition balladeer. Significantly, there’s also at least as much or more guitar in ‘States of Minds’ as there is sax or clarinet. One of the great virtues of Kjetil Moster’s role seems to be an admirable ability to submerge his own identity as an instrumentalist within the overall ensemble, and to serve the music as a whole rather than his own considerable virtuosity.