Alister Spence at his piano (photograph by Jordan K Munns, courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications)
This morning saw my fourth encounter with Australian jazz pianist and composer Alister Spence. My first was in 2018: Intelsat, a duo performance with another jazz pianist, Satoko Fujii. This was followed by his four-movement suite Imagine Meeting You Here, which was performed by the Satoko Fujii Orchestras in Kobe, Nagoya, and Tokyo. In 2020 he released his solo album Whirlpool, a suite of 23 relatively short pieces.This past April saw the release of a new solo album, Always Ever, which is currently available for MP3 download through an Amazon.com Web page.
Like Whirlpool, Always Ever is an album of improvised solo performances. There are sixteen tracks, the shortest being about two and a half minutes and the longest extending to six and a half minutes. Spence is not shy when it comes to upbeat tempos and eccentric rhythms. The attentive listener is thus likely to be satisfied with the diversity of dispositions across the individual selections.
Personally, I enjoyed the overdubbing of metal-on-metal percussion, which introduces the solo piano work in “Distant Cousins.” “Afternoon at Ranscom Street,” on the other hand, seems conceived to evoke the atonal abstractions encountered in improvisations by Cecil Taylor. It would be fair to say that Spence is never shy about adventurous improvisations, which is why I described the Whirlpool album as “a ‘laboratory notebook,’ in which Spence chose to document as wide a diversity of approaches to performance as his imagination would allow.” That documentation has now been continued and extended in Always Ever, which is as much a “journey of discovery” as Whirlpool was.
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