Laura Jurd is a staggeringly good trumpeter – a specialist in hard bop and modal jazz who could hold her own on any jazz bandstand on earth. But one gets the impression that she is constantly pushing against the constraints of whatever lineup she works in. She emerged through the ranks of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, leads the Mercury-nominated electronic jazz-rock band Dinosaur, featured in the atmospheric postrock outfit Blue-Eyed Hawk, and has reinvented classic trumpet works in association with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, most recently playing the Miles Davis role in a reimagining of Sketches of Spain.
Jurd’s solo ventures, however, take her into even weirder territory. Her 2012 solo debut Landing Ground saw her add a string quartet to a jazz trio, while 2015’s Human Spirit pitted Jurd’s horn against the babbling, wordless vocals of Lauren Kinsella. Stepping Back, Jumping In is another massive stylistic reinvention, one that leaps from strident minimalism to orchestrated chaos via fidgety Bartók-like folk forgeries.
The same Ligeti Quartet who appeared on Landing Ground are back, but this time their spiky harmonies and shimmering textures take centre stage.
Jurd’s comrades in Dinosaur also appear, including pianist Elliot Galvin, whose slow-burning composition Ishtar is a wonderful mess of woozy horns set against coma-paced beats. But Jurd throws in other wild cards – Rob Luft’s banjo motif makes the opening track sound like a joyous riot in a wild west saloon bar, while British-Iranian composer Soosan Lolavar plays the santoor (a hammered dulcimer that adds a dazzling, percussive sheen to much of the music) and also writes one of the stand-out tracks – a gorgeous nine-minute ambient drone called I Am the Spring, You Are the Earth.
Not all of it works – some of the churning melodies and fidgety rhythms become quite headache-inducing – but there are moments of unalloyed beauty.
One of them is Companion Species, an extraordinary nine-minute track written by the Norwegian pairing Anja Lauvdal and Heida K Jóhannesdóttir Mobeck, where a series of shimmering textures slowly mutates into something that resembles the Art Ensemble of Chicago entering Afrobeat territory.
Maybe Jurd, for all her manic inventiveness as a composer, shouldn’t stray too far from jazz.
Also out this month
Marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landings are a flurry of space-themed albums. Brian Eno is re-releasing his 1983 LP Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, with a new disc of material. The original soundtrack, featuring ambient classics such as Drift and An Ending (Ascent), is timeless and beautiful; the additional disc largely redundant and quite dull.
Gods of Apollo sees saxophonist Rob Cope creating a virtual film soundtrack mixing archival speeches and Nasa recordings with music that lurches between densely written atonal pieces and ruminative free improv.
Manchester duo Spectral Bazaar features Dave Clarkson (synths) and Ruth Davies (cello, oboe, flute) and their album The Planets is an immersive electro-acoustic voyage, a barrage of drones and treated noises that can be dreamlike (Venus, Neptune) or nightmarish (Saturn, Mars).
