INVISIBLE SUN

From Belgium come AKA MOON, a very talented and intriguing avant-garde Jazz band. On their latest album "Invisible Sun" they are taking us on a musical journey into space with their compositions. There's reminiscences to Ian Carr and Nucleus, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Gil Evans but with a modern sound and mostly more adventurous performances. The result is very refreshing and experimental with lengthy solo excursions. Sometimes it's free-form jazz and on one track I could even hear similarities to Santana's "Caravanserai" album from 1974.

This is definitely not a album for new-beginners in Jazz, but an astounding, breathtaking example of splendid musicianship combined with great compositions.

AM's second Invisible instalment is about the traditional jazz where the other two were about Carnatic music (mostly delving with eastern music and its improvisations patterns) on Moon (not yet released then) while Mother was about the meeting of written western music (with the group Ictus as guest) and improvised music (the trio). While you can find all three elements in all three albums, this one concentrates on jazz, even the very traditional jazz of Duke Ellington's big band music. And for this occasion the Aka Moon quartet asked the usual friends to come and beef up the "horn section".

Most of the album is a succession of Ellington-type of music beefed up by the jazz rock trio, especially Hatzi's bass often giving a bit of a Magma-esque feeling and that you can still hear a bit of Coltrane's spirit haunting the album. The album glides smoothly from track to track, with many good moments, but nothing extraordinaire either, especially if you're not into big band jazz. Then, all a sudden, the mood changes to the extreme with guest Foccroule (the head of many of Belgium's high culture institutions) playing a lengthy but completely-out-of-context Church Organ solo. Actually I'd say it would drag on way too long if the last three minutes were not a slow evolution from the organ alone being joined by Cassol's sax and its slow but implacable metamorphosis from classic into jazz. The last track is a pure joy to listen to and still spins regularly a few years after this album's first listens in my deck.

Not as essential as the other two Invisible albums, this album might have been a bit of a bore if it was not for the last 12 minutes.