Meditative jazz comes in all forms, sometimes it’s too close to new age, while other times it could be the closest thing to an epiphany you’ve been looking for for most of your life. Roland P. Young‘s Istet Serenade (Em) is a bit closer to the latter.
Young plays the kind of jazz that sounds like it could have been an obscure soundtrack album from the late 60’s or early 70’s, imagine Pharoah Sanders teaming up with Vilayat Khan and you would enter the trippiness of the music found on this album. Its structure comes from it being abstract and tranquil, meditative because the listener has to allow themselves to simply float into the sounds that somehow feel distant through the thick wall of reverb and echo. If the first person you thought of was Paul Horn with his classic albums recorded in the Taj Mahaj, it’s a bit like that but instead of Horn looking to discover something, Young sounds like that thing has been found, and he is speaking with his inner consciousness, and together they have a dialogue. The sounds within are created with a saxophone, clarinets, kalimba, and various electronic ingredients, with the clarinet being played at times to where it might sound like a guitar. Young’s approach to the clarinet is not unlike Jeremiah Cymerman and his album In Memory Of The Labyrinth System (Tzadik), in that he plays it but it is not heard as you might expect.
What you can expect is to be taken places, mentally and if you’re in the right frame of mind, even physically. Albums like this move me because even though Young’s pieces sound very foreign, it’s as if you’ve been (t)here before. Istet Serenade is the sound of home, or the home you wish to end up in when your existence in this lifetime comes to a close. Moving.
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This Is Book's Music 