Michael Aadal has visited us several times previously, within his jazz-fusion band Aadal, but here he returns in as stripped down a version as you can imagine, with a solo album in which, as he says, he simply ran his guitar (an old `61 Gibson Barney Kessel, sometimes a Fender Telecaster) straight into an amp with a couple of pedals sparingly applied.
It’s his first solo guitar release, recorded in a two-week period in the summer of 2023. It had its roots during the Covid pandemic when, with gigs in very short supply, he started posting short improvised instrumental pieces pretty much every day onto Instagram, as a method of staying sane, I guess.
Subsequently the encouragement started to flow in from people that suggested he might make an entire album of such short solo pieces.
He did, with the caveat that they remained on the spot recordings, not something to be fretted about endlessly. Just raw and simple, improvised on the hoof, with the focus on melody, form, harmony and rhythm.
And many of the titles suggest the variety of emotions that most people went through in a period that is now slowly fading in the memory: ‘Arrival’; ‘Departure’; ‘In the midst of it all’; ‘In the shadows’; ‘Twisted road’ and ‘Descending’.
So intimacy was the primary goal and that’s what I was looking for in this sample. I’ve always tried (probably unsuccessfully) to read his mind, or at least his intentions, with his bands’ jazz pieces because that’s the only way I can attack such an unpredictable musical form.
This isn’t jazz, it’s closer to classical composition, and with influences that include Bill Frisell, Keith Jarrett, Bach, Daniel Lanois, Julian Lage, Mark Knopfler and Hank Marvin, but the methodology remains the same.
And I chose ‘1938’, the ninth of 16 tracks,because that is a remarkably evocative title and one that has rarely if ever been used before. It could stand for anything, from a premium bottle of champagne to a year of birthday to the final pre-war year.
If it is suggestive of the latter it would equate in some ways to 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, since when things have never quite been the same, have they?
And, without a lyrical content that’s how it comes across to me, the first half of the song a juxtaposition of calmer notes and more hurried ones as people make sudden, urgent preparations for new and worrisome circumstances. Then a mid section of disparity in the notation, hinting perhaps at confusion and fear, before it ultimately resolves itself (a good jazz term!) in an air of resignation.
I’ve either got close to it or I’m talking pretentious crap!
Anyway – make your own mind up.
The album was released on the London label Clonmell Jazz Social.
Aadal the band is playing four UK dates, three of them in Scotland, in the next few days:
Oct 16 Glasgow – The Butterfly and Pig
Oct 17 Aberdeen – The Blue Lamp
Oct 18 Edinburgh – Traverse Theatre
Oct 19 Leeds – Jazz at 92
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michael.aadal.7
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelaadal/
