Comparing Danish keyboardist Morten Schantz’s new project to Weather Report is a compliment. It’s not just because Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter first consummated the relationship between jazz and electricity, setting the tone for all who followed, nor that Schantz favours vintage synthesisers sounds that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970s.
It's also because that central dynamic, between keyboards and saxophone, is played again out in Godspeed. As well, Schantz has his own Shorter in the mercurial Marius Neset, a fluent, fearlessly creative improviser capable of similar levels of invention and subversion.
If there is a difference, it is in drummer Anton Eger’s sequencer-inspired grooves, which give the trio’s music a high-energy, 21st-century edge.
