Joy of Abstraction

The title of the album was conceived by Ganavya, who uttered these two words together in a moment of epiphany while we were in conversation with another fellow artist during the summer of 2017: the amount of agency we believe we have determines our relationship with abstraction. These words have remained with me over time, swirling together in different ways in my musical and intellectual life.

“At a certain point, there is only good and ‘gooder’” — Bill Dixon

“There’s a lot of healing and a lot of forgiveness in these songs,” says Pete Francis. “It can be scary to face your fears and ask the tough questions, but sometimes you have to step into the darkness in order to find your light.” That juxtaposition of darkness and light lies at the heart of, PTRN SKY!, Francis’ captivating new album and first full-length release since his 2019 departure from Dispatch.

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The French jazz scene has a vitality, an originality and a do-it- all and do-it-anyway mentality about it right now. It is French musicians who are blazing the new trails for contemporary European jazz. There is a wonderful open-mindedness towards all musical cultures, genres and tendencies; and yet French musicians also give off the sense of having a proper grounding in their own tradition. A musician who represents all of these tendencies ‘par excellence’ is saxophonist Emile Parisien. Born in Cahors in the wine-growing region of the Lot, he is a jazz visionary. He may have one foot in that ancient soil, but his gaze is firmly fixed on the future. The leading French newspaper Le Monde has called him “the best new thing that has happened in European jazz for a long time,” while the Hamburg radio station NDR made the point of telling its listeners to give Parisien their “undivided attention.”

As band names go, this is one with a range of possible meanings. Some searching shows that it's actually been used by a handful of different outfits ranging from punk-metal to experimental electronics. The Flown from Modena, Italy, meanwhile, finds a niche blending an insistent sense of rhythm with the looseness of free-jazz improv. They sound like they've flown away from not just the earth, but the more obvious notions of structure and harmony as well.