Stein Urheim – Downhill Uplift
Hubro – Out Now
Some music gives the impression that it has always existed, or that it has somehow bypassed the hard graft of the creative process. The idea that a musician as neither artist nor craftsman, but as conduit undersells the act of creativity and the time an artist has to put in to get to the position where they can even begin to make that music. It is an idea prevalent in jazz, perhaps because of that genre’s historical links with spirituality and its frequent use of free improvisational techniques.
Much of what we call spiritual or cosmic jazz is burdened by this misrepresentation – the belief that something that inspires transcendence must have been created by an act of transcendence – and often the artists themselves are the first to perpetuate this myth, either as an act of self-abnegation or through a fervent belief in the righteousness of their project. A case in point is Sun Ra: for all his gnomic theatre and Gnostic self-mythologising, he was essentially an extremely hard-working musician, bandleader and promoter whose ability to push the boundaries of musical expression was rooted in talent and dedication.
Norwegian bandleader and guitarist Stein Urheim’s latest album occupies a branch on the same family tree as artists like Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry. But where those artists often dealt with deep time and wide space in distinctly mystical or devotional terms, Urheim’s outlook might better be described as ‘earth jazz’. Many of the tracks on Downhill Uplift are vocal, and they tend to deal with more pressing issues, principally environmentalism. Perhaps as a result of this perspective, the album comes across very much as Urheim’s work, his own vision, rather than something dredged up from the mire of pseudo-spiritualism. And it is all the better for it.
The opening title track is about as spacey as it gets: a howling, weeping guitar instrumental underpinned by raga-like drones. But on Brave New World Revisited the album’s groove really kicks in. The opening half establishes a series of circling musical patterns while the vocal refrain acts as a kind of spike on which the music is caught. The effect is similar to some of those great vocal tracks of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The playing throughout is magnificent. The drums give the impression of clatter and freedom, but are always under tight control. The flutter and chime of the song’s finale is perfectly paced: you hardly notice the buildup of the instruments until they are upon you. Urheim has assembled a crop of fine musicians to accompany him – bassist Ole Morten Vagan and multi-instrumentalists/percussionist Kare Opheim and Hans Hulbaekmo – and they prove both adroit and adaptable.
On Amalfitano a woozy intro gives way to a focussed slide guitar workout and another of those vocal choruses, this one backed up by crashing drums, before the whole thing descends into a slightly mad but unashamedly melodious, eastern-influenced finish. The whole thing, somehow, simultaneously resembles Mahavishnu Orchestra and the Grateful Dead. The lengthy Free To Go shows both sides of Urheim: the out-there bandleader and the singer songwriter. What starts as a soft and song-based composition soon undergoes an intense and fiery transformation. Aside from the obvious influences, it seems that Urheim also shares space with contemporary practitioners as diverse as Jakub Ziołek and Eric Chenaux.
The diversity doesn’t stop there though: Lamp dabbles in some freaky, sleepy kind of eastern lounge-folk punctuated by a cacophonous mid-section, and the album sees itself out in strange and magnificent fashion with Poor Moon, a fully-fledged psych-folk blues raga that recalls, by turns, Cream, the Byrds and a kind of south Asian version of Pink Floyd. It caps a stunning achievement in a suitably left-field manner.
Downhill Uplift is the sort of album that will sound different every time you listen to it, and while it takes inspiration from a cluster of well-worn genres, the way those genres are meshed together seems entirely novel. Like many great albums of its type, it seems to come from a strange, unearthly place. But don’t let that fool you: it is the work of an extremely proficient musician and his band.
https://steinurheim.bandcamp.com/album/downhill-uplift