Plaistow — Citadelle

The world turns. The pendulum swings. Night gives way to day. Good stuff comes out of bad situations. Good situations turn sour and cynical. There may be something in our brains, or maybe there is just something out there in ‘the real’ that makes us think in terms of oppositions, cycles, balances, pairs, light and dark twins. This is what we call ‘dualist’ thinking. There is a God and there is a Devil. There is matter and there is spirit. Another version of dualist thinking is more obviously tailor-made for orthodoxy. For musical dogmatists, the kind of people who only listen to one kind of stuff and dismiss the rest, there is a jazz and there is not-jazz, or heavy metal and soggy rubbish, or ‘pure’ folk and hopelessly compromised commercial music. For those who regard cultural dogma with suspicion, these distinctions don’t seem to matter.

Someone asked me the other day what Plaistow’s music ‘was’. I’m not usually lost for a word but I had to pass on this one. Jazz is very much at the heart of it, and with Citadelle jazz has come through with a new and growing authority, but there are other things going on as well, procedures that come from electronica (even if the specific sounds do not), from the neo-tonality of contemporary classical music (whether the guys consciously listen to these composers or not) and from a huge reservoir of central European vernaculars, where the musical cultures of East and West collide on a daily basis, on the radio, on television commercials, on piped music in bars, on ringtones.

The very best thing about fast food (apart from creating spaces where you can both taste and hear all that crazy syncretistic stuff going on) is that it has also, inevitably, spawned a slow food movement. The very best thing about Easy Listening is that adds a new and different value to not-so-easy listening. Plaistow play not-so-easy music. The harmonies on Citadelle are not Bill Evans harmonies. The bass lead on ‘Chicago’ is more reminiscent of the Paul Bley group of the early 70s, with Kent Carter, and there is an angularity to the piano playing that points away from Evans’s lonely romanticism. Johann Bourquenez says he thought Lacrimosa, the group’s previous album, was the first to be conceived ‘without too much randomness’. It’s an interesting choice of word and slightly enigmatic. He will put his own construction on it, but for me this is a record that is very much more than a collection of tracks. It has direction, trajectory, what the philosophers call ‘intentionality’. It seems to be going somewhere and somewhere definite.