Habarigani are four Swiss yobs that can play any kind of music you can throw at them. They seem to gravitate toward jazz and modern classical music, as well as to Swiss popular and folk tunes, but that's where categorization stops. This is a musicians' collective. All members are composers, all members are fine improvisers, and all play multiple instruments, mostly woodwinds, reeds, and brass, but there is a prominently featured accordion courtesy of
Hans Hassler as well. Their first, self-titled record was a workout that had the group wetting their feet and exploring their own unique textures and timbres in the same way that other collectives like
Don Cherry and
Collin Walcott's
Codona did, or the
Eric Dolphy/
Mal Waldron band, Steve Lacy Sextet, or
the Kronos Quartet. All things are equal; all things are different from everything else on the planet. That said, there are places where you can hear the band's sentiments, such as in "Sao Numinous," which quotes liberally and tenderly from the complex harmonics of
Thelonious Monk's "Evidence," with the squeezebox no less. But where does one put an exercise in breath and tone control like "Numinous," where trombones, clarinets, bass clarinets, trumpet, and accordion crawl around one another's phraseology in order to arrive at the "truth of the drone"? Perhaps in "Sabrina and Piselli," where certain slants of
Charles Mingus' sunlight in his
New Tijuana Moods period can be heard, or in
Darius Milhaud's sonic landscapes in
Hans Hassler's "Kein Schnee." But it's not who you can hear inside
Habarigani's compositions that matters as much as what they do with them contrapuntally and harmonically. The melodic invention put forth by this quartet ups the ante for modern jazz and improvised music. This band's first recording led to high expectations for a follow-up; number two surpasses them in spades. ~ Thom Jurek