Matt Carmichael – Where Will The River Flow
Porthole Music (PM01) – 12 March 2021
You may remember sax player Matt Carmichael from his appearance as a finalist in the BBC Young Jazz Musician competition in 2020. He is soon to graduate from the Scottish Conservatoire but don’t let his youth fool you. He is already a seasoned player with bags of talent. His quartet has been together since 2016 and they have appeared at many iconic venues around Britain, including Ronnie Scott’s. It is an incredibly tight unit featuring pianist Fergus McCreadie (an award winner in his own right who recently had his own showcase on BBC radio 3), bassist Ali Watson and drummer Tom Potter. Ok. A jazz quartet with talent. What’s so different?
Well, to begin with, you can’t ignore the fact that Matt’s music (these are all his own compositions) is firmly rooted in his love for Scottish traditional music, with an occasional nod to Scandinavian influences due to a recent spell in Norway that has done him no harm at all. In so much jazz the improvisation can leave the listener to rely on an implied melody that can get lost in the pyrotechnics. That is not allowed to happen here. The traditional style tunes are not allowed to get lost. Each musician takes on the responsibility to keep the listener aware of the tune at the heart of the piece. Fergus McCreadie’s piano does this job particularly well. Ali Watson has perfect intonation on the bass and the drumming of Tom Potter is dynamic yet sensitive and never intrusive (as a time-served bass player in a ceilidh band for more than twenty years those are words I never thought I would write). Matt’s sax shows an incredible range of tone from the breathy, mellow sound on ‘Interlude’ that will raise the hairs on your neck to a fiery, blisteringly fast technique on a track like ‘The Spey’ where his incredible unison playing with the piano will leave your mouth open in disbelief. This track alone is proof, if needed, that good jazz is a mixture of arrangement and improvisation without one dominating the other. ‘Valley’ is the boys at play. It is time for them to be adventurous without being directionless. There is driving rhythmic piano at the heart of this track and some great double bass with some fine bowed passages. There is imagination here that bodes well for the future.
The title track is, for me, one of the highlights. It is something of an epic at a little over eleven minutes that seems to allow Matt to give reign to all of his diverse influences in turn. He claims that this piece is the reflection of a musician at the beginning of a career looking out at what might be coming over the hill to meet him. I don’t believe he has much to concern him. This debut album puts down a marker to suggest that we can, and should, expect great things in future from these guys as individuals and as a quartet. This CD is one for late nights with a good malt whisky. Close your eyes and bathe in it! Top-quality music.
The Spey (Live at Pianodrome –featured here)
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Photo Credit: Hamish Mcleod