Igor Lumpert & Innertextures - Eleven (2018)

Here is the third reprise of Igor Lumpert’s project Innertextures, but this time (after “Innertextures” and “Innertextures Live”), not with the previous trio format. The band with Chris Tordini and Nasheet Waits is now a quartet, with Greg Ward playing the second saxophone and Kenny Grohowski taking the drum sticks, and in “Eleven” there’s two guests summing up: trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson on a couple of tracks and bass clarinetist John Ellis playing on another one (in the past, Lumpert had the collaboration of musicians like Robert Glasper and Jacob Bro, and even his trio was once formed with Matt Brewer and Tommy Crane). Important to notice is the fact that Lumpert, Tordini, Grohowski and Finlayson studied together at the New School of Music. The musical formula remains the same, but now more matured and with other nuances: a kind of «hyper-mode bop» with funk elements and some aspects of Slovenian folk music (he was born in Novo Mesto), as the specialized press noted, with «odd-metered rhythmic pacing and mesmeric variances in pitch». For more than 15 years living in New York, Lumpert’s jazz is sounding more American than ever, full of verve and groove, but without losing its “trademark” of complexity and unpredictability. Maybe the most internationally recognized of all Slovenian jazz musicians, this former pupil of Chico Hamilton and Billy Harper who played with luminaries like John Abercrombie and Sonny Simmons is really the face of the present universal dimension of this music genre, with each composition brilliantly confirming that status. A must listen, must have record, marvelously produced by Robert Sadin.