"Ezra Pound said that all criticism was comparison. Ezra Pound said lots of other unhelpful things, but this one, at least, can be quoted safely, whether one agrees or not. His point was that to make a helpful judgement about a poem (his speciality) or piece of music or painting, one somehow had to place it within a long line of prior and similar work. One also owed it to thve reader or listener to offer a clue as to what might be expected.

Critics know very well that this is the case, and the more self-aware try to avoid falling into certain clichéd comparisons. Presented with an album of tenor saxophone and drums, it will take a superhuman effort not to mention Trane and Ali and Interstellar Space. Piano, guitar and bass? There's a little more choice, but one or more of Nat Cole, Ahmad Jamal or Oscar Peterson is likely to figure in the published notice. Perhaps most egregious of all is one now almost as common. Encounter a group consisting of trumpet, sax, bass and drums, conspicuously no orthodox harmony instrument, and you are liable to run into an early reference to the great Ornette Coleman - Don Cherry quartet of the late 1950s, arguably one of the most influential line-ups in modern jazz.

A nicely disingenuous way to say that you are holding just such a recording and group at this moment. For here are Marco von Orelli, Tommy Meier, Luca Sisera and Sheldon Suter, making a return appearance, and even with the gentle comparative leverage provided by a previous album - is this one similar? the same? radically different? - we have to find something to say about it. If Pound is to be believed that means finding a logical comparison, and that leads us inexorably to Coleman and Cherry, whether we resist it or not.

Sometimes it's more graceful to just bend and go with the inevitable. This recording, and especially something like the wonderful "Before And The Ghost Dance", reminds me of the Coleman-Cherry group. But how so? Not surely just because the instrumentation is so similar? Mercifully, it's more than that. The welcome emergence of Lotus Crash has interesting and wider parallels with what was happening in jazz at the end of the 1950s. Most art forms tend to oscillate between periods of what can casually be called primitivism and what on the surface looks like high sophistication, of technique, content and presentation. Famously, punk came along to sweep away the accumulated pretensions - vast keyboard arrays, Persian carpets, triple-decker fantasy concept albums - of "prog rock". Bebop had earlier come along to suggest a different path to the increasingly corporatized sound of swing, and Ornette Coleman came along to ask serious questions of the generic dullness and deadness of a great deal of so-called hard bop.

Are Lotus Crash doing the same? These men are too sophisticated, as musicians and thinkers, to be labelled primitives. But they do what all radical innovators do and reach back, not to the last or the last-but-one stylistic fashion, but to the roots of jazz itself. In a world of conservatory-trained jazz musicians, with careers meticulously planned (some even have MBAs!) and their music carefully rationalised in an effort to anticipate and second-guess the eventual reviews, one starts to feel as if the music scene has turned into a vast IKEA: accessible, affordable, eternally unsurprising, consumable in bulk.

Lotus Crash overturn all that. They play with a radical simplicity that feels crafted rather than mass-produced. These few thoughts for the liner have been delayed quite simply by the number of times I have listened to these tracks, not because they are puzzling or so obscure that they require multiple auditions, but simply because what the band does is as refreshing as seltzer after a cloying meal. We listen to them - and I guarantee you will - with frequent pleasure in the same way that we turn to Parker, to Mozart, even, and to Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, because they clear away the plaque of predictability that threatens our aesthetic heartbeat. Every time I have listened to this music, it provides a different spin on itself, not because it is densely layered and complex, but because it deals with musical fundamentals in an engaged and humane manner. And that's the other thing about it: these guys may go out under an enigmatic group name, but they come across as personalities, very different, possibly sometimes even contentious, but absolutely united in purpose.

A final question lurks. We would now say, without much fear of contradiction, that the Coleman-Cherry quartet was "important" in the evolution of post-bop jazz. One would have to add other groups that took the same radical simplicity as a guideline. One obvious example, familiar from this same label, is Albert Ayler's work, again with Don Cherry, where the rawness of two individual voices, speaking directly from the spirit, comes across with almost frightening intensity. Or the somewhat quieter and more considered work of clarinettist John Carter with cornetist Bobby Bradford, two men almost permanently marginalised in the history of modern jazz. All of these groups drew on a similar spirit, and not incidentally on the sense of a quartet as containing shifting axes of understanding: horns together, "rhythm" instruments together, saxophone and drums, trumpet and bass; and then the full ensemble sound.

Is it possible to make similar claims for Lotus Crash? Mercifully, that is for others to decide and only at some moment in the future. What is important is that they restore the most important practice of all, that of basic listening. It's wonderful to hear great music for the first time, and greybeards deeply envy the moment when a young person hears Armstrong or Bird or Coltrane or Miles for the very first time. But here's the thing; there's an even greater pleasure in music that seems new and fresh every time you hear it. And that's what you are just about to enjoy. Be ready to make your own comparisons, but knowing that none of them will ever quite do the job!"-Brian Morton, September 2024