The spare, blues-inflected dirge “East Flows the River” lacks some much-needed disruptive element or event to keep it from sounding like a jazzy piece of boom-bap rap production without an MC.
Inner Fire falters when the ensemble attempts full pieces in the “spiritual” mold, as on “Black Orchid", a slick piece of lite-funk. Steve Patterson and Ray Murray, the SJO’s tenor and baritone players, often channel the legendary saxophonist in their solos, and Chrétien frequently emulates the keyboard flourishes of McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane. The band has always claimed the style as a source of inspiration-their 2007 album Freedom No Go Die features a rendition of Pharoah Sanders’ hypnotic half-hour opus “The Creator Has a Master Plan”. “As the Crow Flies”, the single finest track, unites an unsettled horn theme and modal chord changes that would be at home on a pre-electric Herbie Hancock record with a bossa nova backbeat.Įqually fundamental to the ethos of Inner Fire is the school of spiritual jazz that blossomed in the wake of John Coltrane’s Eastern-influenced explorations of the mid–1960s.
The album’s highlights are its most culturally ambiguous selections, like “One Life to Live”, which mixes rhumba and reggaeton rhythms, and “Sommet En Sommet”, a dense, three-against-four shuffle influenced partially by Guinean music. The driving polyrhythms of Nigerian folk music that marked their earlier work are set aside in favor of more laid-back percussion indigenous to the Americas. Much of Inner Fire consists of intricately arranged, harmonically adventurous Afro-Latin jazz this sound, when paired with the lush piano and vibraphone backgrounds Chrétien favors, creates resonances with Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz.
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