Mary Coughlan: Repeat Rewind (Strange Brew)
Mary Coughlan just gets better and better. Her latest album has many of the qualities we’ve come to treasure in one of Ireland’s greatest jazz and blues singers: that warm, tender, lived-in voice; the sardonic edge; smartly produced songs that swing between cabaret theatricality, mournful ballads and jazzy pop. (At times her voice approaches how I imagine a sixtysomething Amy Winehouse might have sounded.) Yet there is also something more to Repeat Rewind: an introspection, a sense of survival, a looking back with hard-won compassion. On Tinseltown, a wistful yet thankful ode to Christmas, she sings, “six gears forwards and nine in reverse, thank God I’m alive.” Thank God, indeed.
Niwel Tsumbu: Milimo (Diatribe)
Stunning solo album from this gifted acoustic guitarist – born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, since 2004, based in Ireland – who is known for his work with, among others, Rhiannon Giddens, Éamonn Cagney and Liam Ó Maonlaí. Recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Realworld Studios and released by the adventurous Dublin new-music label Diatribe Records, Milimo’s 13 mostly self-penned tracks total less than half an hour’s music. But within that time and space all kinds of captivating cross-border vistas are opened up, a singular musical world that brilliantly, and seemingly effortlessly, elides elements of jazz, flamenco, classical, soukous, folk, rock and more.
Sue Rynhart: Say Pluto (Self-released)
This third album from the remarkable Dublin vocalist and composer Sue Rynhart takes its inspiration from Gothic short stories; the eight songs, six written by Rynhart, are similarly dark and haunted – they are largely tales of love, loss and death.
[ Sue Rynhart: ‘I don’t drink alcohol but love an evening cup of tea’Opens in new window ]
Accompanied by the superlative Welsh pianist Huw Warren and the versatile American bassist Dan Bodwell, Rynhart colours her crystalline jazz phrasing with earthy hues and folk inflections; the results are at once fragile, resolute and affecting. The music may occasionally be too whimsical and dramatic for some. But it pays generously to stick with Sue Rynhart; there really is no one quite like her.
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Aengus Hackett Trio: Aengus Hackett Trio (Self-released)
The Galway-based guitarist and composer Aengus Hackett creates music across an impressively wide range of genres, from jazz to folk, postrock, gamelan and synth pop; he also has a parallel career as the electronic musician Penji. This debut release from his agile top-tier trio with the double bassist Derek Whyte and the drummer Matthew Jacobson focuses more on Hackett’s heartland jazz enthusiasms. Over 11 strong and rhythmically driven original tunes, the guitarist sounds both sweet-toned and gritty, straight-ahead and experimental; Hackett always seems to be searching for an original line and perspective. An assured and ambitious album that delivers much and, for the future, promises even more.
Adjunct Ensemble: Habits of Assembly, Live at Cafe Oto (Touch Sensitive)
Adjunct Ensemble is an experimental jazz collective led by the Belfast composer Jamie Thompson that had some critical success last year with the thrilling “collagist anti-opera” Sovereign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy. That album forms the basis for this 2023 London Jazz Festival recording, which sees the ensemble slimmed down to a quintet of Thompson on piano and electronics with three leading Irish performers – the poet Felispeaks, the tenor saxophonist Sam Comerford and the drummer Steve Davis – plus the Newcastle bassist John Pope. Moving between spoken word, free jazz, deep grooves, sonic montages and more, the album asks: what can music do in the face of challenges such as migration and ecological destruction and horrors such as Gaza? This is one, impassioned, response.
