In the mid-2000s, Souljazz Orchestra emerged playing West African funk and highlife rife with propulsive horn hooks, blown-out keyboards, and call-and-response refrains full of political fervor. On Inner Fire, the Ottawa collective sounds different. The program is once again curated by composer and bandleader Pierre Chrétien, who brings a crate-digger’s thirst for obscure and offbeat musical idioms. Under his direction, SJO patch together swatches of North American, African, and Latin styles to create hybrids that resist easy categorization.
Much of Inner Fire consists of intricately arranged, harmonically adventurous Afro-Latin jazz; this sound, when paired with the lush piano and vibraphone backgrounds Chrétien favors, creates resonances with Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz. The driving polyrhythms of Nigerian folk music that marked their earlier work are set aside in favor of more laid-back percussion indigenous to the Americas. The album’s highlights are its most culturally ambiguous selections, like “One Life to Live”, which mixes rhumba and reggaeton rhythms, and “Sommet En Sommet”, a dense, three-against-four shuffle influenced partially by Guinean music. “As the Crow Flies”, the single finest track, unites an unsettled horn theme and modal chord changes that would be at home on a pre-electric Herbie Hancock record with a bossa nova backbeat.
Equally fundamental to the ethos of Inner Fire is the school of spiritual jazz that blossomed in the wake of John Coltrane’s Eastern-influenced explorations of the mid–1960s. The band has always claimed the style as a source of inspiration—their 2007 album Freedom No Go Die features a rendition of Pharoah Sanders’ hypnotic half-hour opus “The Creator Has a Master Plan”. Steve Patterson and Ray Murray, the SJO’s tenor and baritone players, often channel the legendary saxophonist in their solos, and Chrétien frequently emulates the keyboard flourishes of McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane.
Inner Fire falters when the ensemble attempts full pieces in the “spiritual” mold, as on “Black Orchid", a slick piece of lite-funk. The spare, blues-inflected dirge “East Flows the River” lacks some much-needed disruptive element or event to keep it from sounding like a jazzy piece of boom-bap rap production without an MC. “Celestial Blues”, a cover of a Roland Kirk-styled piece of 70s avant-soul by Gary Bartz NTU Troop makes one curious about the original record, but the SJO’s version itself ultimately comes off as inert.
Inner Fire's biggest problem is a sporadic lack of energy. The band’s recent interest in more introspective and less tightly structured music doesn’t always play to their strengths, namely, their ability to devise and deliver taut and constantly mutating arrangements. But the group's impulse to dismantle and globalize their sound (or their refusal to settle on one) is admirable, and their efforts to do so result in some inventive moments.
