NEW RELEASE: OMER GOVREEN QUARTET –

Quartet of Amsterdam-based bassist and composer raises its game, inspired by desperation and confusion.  

You’re a musician and sick of diseases and the disease or you have childhood traumas that are strong as the jawbones of a hyena, you’re transfixed by the beautiful eyes of the moon, the toilet is clogged and the rent is due and the lamp post asks you to dance or you’re Jewish bassist Omer Govreen, based in Amsterdam, in a good place, sidekick to luminaries as Michael Moore and Tineke Postma, but you’re in the middle of global chaos and trying to make sense of what essentially is senseless, either way, love or the leaking faucets of fate or war, you can’t help but spill some of this in your work, outlet for various emotions.

Equilibrium between intense and melancholic, enervating and cathartic, All Things Equal, the second album of Govreen’s quartet following 2022’s Maya featuring pianist Floris Kappeyne, vibraphonist Aleksander Sever and drummer Wouter Kühne, is a sound to behold. All cats equal, so to speak, they wander freely through Govreen’s expressionist landscape, never losing the big picture and with a clear focus obviously gained from experience of playing together for a long time.

Among many delights, the elegiac All Things Equal is beautifully brought to its conclusion with a repetitive strain that is worked out dynamically by all concerned, The Pole/Call is a painting that mixes the sweetest pink with spots of deep purple, Narrowing a sparkling and subtle polyrhythmic spree. Here and there, the link between bop and Ornette Coleman is skittishly defined, a playful side to a record that depends strongly on Govreen’s flexible and warm-blooded bass playing.

You can’t imagine someone else, a trumpeter, a guitarist, joining this outfit. This is it, this is as it should be. An acoustic jazz quartet that inventively strives for the way Radiohead or Edward Munch worked up strong emotions. High praise.