The astonishing seven-string, UK-born double bass virtuoso Paul Rogers is
rarely heard in his homeland, but the French jazz scene benefits from
this. Over a career that began in the 1970s, Rogers’s orchestral sound and
drum-like drive have accompanied many contemporary jazz heroes – including the
late Mike Osborne, Keith Tippett, Evan Parker and New Yorker Tim Berne. But
Whahay is his undisguised genuflection to his primary model – Charles Mingus –
respectfully but freely played alongside Loop Collective saxophonist Robin
Fincker and French drummer Fabien Duscombs. Fincker is warbly on clarinet and
leisurely on tenor sax against Duscombs’s energetic pulse on Better Git in Your
Soul, and he slithers and squirts in improvised bursts on a churning
Pithecanthropus Erectus. Reincarnation of a Lovebird is a playfully loose
call-and-response conversation that becomes an ambient trance, and Rogers’s
take on a dreamy Goodbye Pork Pie Hat opens with a masterly piece of double
bass lyricism. It’s a little classic.
