There’s a hunger for shredding in the air. After years of press-play shows becoming the norm, artists are once again being rewarded for actually being good at their instruments. Fievel Is Glauque, SML, YHWH Nailgun, Black Midi’s various spin-offs—we’re living in proggy times, but you know what’s even better than someone who can play their instrument well? Someone who’s so good that they know how to pretend to be sloppy.
Nu Jazz are a New York supergroup that’s congealed out of a handful of overlapping scenes. Vocalist Danny Orlowski howls as part of noise/gabber/industrial/etc. group Deli Girls, with drummer John Bemis of Murderpact joining alongside as of late. Synthesist Ben Shirken runs the experimental 29 Speedway label. Guitarist Adam Turay and trumpeter Ryan Easter both come from the jazzier side of the tracks, the former playing with Afro-R&B group the Narcotix, the latter with more out-there units like WRENS. And bassist Kevin Eichenberger skates the edge of all these sounds in CGI Jesus, a kind of avant-garde jazz-punk band that’s probably the closest analogue to what these scattered performers can agree on when they meet up together.
The magic of Nu Jazz is that in spite of how chaotic it could all end up, the resulting sound is surprisingly smooth. Sure, Orlowski is performing Auto-Tuned exorcisms over everything as if they were filling in for Jennifer Herrema at a particularly hellish Black Bananas gig. But the backing players show tremendous restraint: Turay’s glassy guitar licks have a Metheny-ish tint to them, while Bemis opts to ride quick, slinky rhythms rather than abusing his crash cymbal. The whole thing lands closer to a murky inversion of early Return to Forever than the punk spasms of Naked City. With only a small batch of self-released material and live recordings to document their smudged sound so far, Un Jazz’s arrival on Orange Milk is the collective’s first real spotlight to showcase just what they’re capable of. They don’t disappoint.
Since Nu Jazz’s debut, the band’s attention to dynamics has already sharpened. “In My City” hits an early high: The group swells around a nauseous synth loop like a cloud of pollution, coming at the groove from numerous funky angles over seven dystopian minutes. Their disparate sonic elements form a dissonant but cohesive whole, wisps of trumpet and electronic woodwinds flashing by as quickly as flickering subway car lights. There’s a tactile feel to the band’s playing that keeps everything from devolving into electronic mush—details like Bemis’ snappy sidestick intro to “369,” or the extra bit of low-end crunch on Eichenberger’s bass in the climax of “Who Do You Work For” that imbue this ultimately lo-fi music with a surprising lushness. Orlowski does much more than just scream (though when they do, they bring a rich sense of detail to their gurgles), and they have a peculiar way of wresting tiny bits of melody from the shrieking drops of “369” and “Civil War.” It feels like you’re only ever getting half of their words, while the other half gets sucked into some nightmarish trash vortex.
That musicianship makes songs like “IV,” with its shuffling mix of standup bass and eye-dilated church-organ synths, land with a seductive sliminess. Ironically, it’s the band’s attempts at more purely noisy music that have less punch. “Return of the Rant” is the biggest barrier, opening the record with almost 10 minutes of needling feedback and lurching bass and drums, as Orlowski harangues, “We only need like 10 billionaires to forfeit/From that perspective/It wouldn’t take much/To torch it.” It could almost read as a parody of jazzy slam poetics, or an attempt to simply clear out any listeners not prepared to weather the oncoming storm. But without much beyond Samantha Kochis’ flute to stand out from the din, neither this track nor the album’s handful of harsh interludes capture the subtler dissonances that actually make the group exciting; the in-the-red, blastbeat-laden middle stretch of “Civil War” makes a much better case for their heavy side.
Of the many things Nu Jazz juggle, the most impressive may be how they manage to impart their druggy, fried NYC swag without being afraid to get dorky with it. Though they may act like they don’t give a fuck, there’s real musicianship here, a structured nuance to the chaos that’s queasy in all the right ways. In this post-everything world, it’s easier than ever to slap a label like “jazz” or “prog” or “nu metal” onto your band, and put all your focus into the aesthetic without understanding what makes the genre actually tick. Nu Jazz put the effort in to really get underneath all these sounds, ripping out their guts and figuring out how to jam with the entrails.
