Label: Clean Fedd, 2021

Personnel - Susana Santos Silva: trumpet; Mette Rasmussen: alto saxophone; Ada Rave: tenor saxophone, clarinet; Kaja Draksler: piano.

Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler, Danish saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and Argentine saxophonist/clarinetist Ada Rave join forces in a new all-female avant-garde quartet with a fabulous command of timbre and texture. The name of the group, Hearth, came up as a blend of the words earth and heart, and the music on Melt clarifies why. The album consists of an improvised six-piece program recorded live at Portalegre Jazz Festival in Portugal.

You can almost trail a path into nature when listening to “At Daybreak”, a collage of curious sounds - many of them drawn from extended techniques and shaping up as fluttering reiterative figures - that will enable you to picture skies, birds, forests and mountains in your head. Among all these, and some more whispering and hissing sounds and percussive elements, a human voice stands out saying: “silence! too much talking” and “how far do you want to go?”.

I could hear the sea and the wind at the end of “Turbulent Flow”, which starts with dreamy piano playing infused with moderate tension, working as a platform for agitated saxophones and trumpet in a collision course. There’s more harmonic adherence on this piece than on any other, but on top of that, Draksler offers us an impeccable solo piano moment that is as much tonally blurred as it is colorful.

The opener, “Fading Icebergs”, has these notes of different durations and pitches coming and go at their own rhythm. They are deliberately and contrapuntally mounted to throb a pulsation that screams for life.

With three distinct parts, “Tidal Phase” has each musician reacting to the surroundings. Without delay, there’s buzzing, spiraling and frantic activity living all together; the middle section consists of undying piercing notes that resist to the propulsion of a popping saxophone and piano punctuation; and all ends with a reflective abstraction with the horns generating notes of warning that decay in pitch.

The experimental integrity of the group erupts with obscure intertwined forms on “Diving Bell”, which, clocking in at 14 minutes, is the longest track on the record. The horns here are raucous, snorting and grunting as they build a cadence that contrasts with the constellation of scintillating piano notes that grow from sparse to abundant. At some point, Rasmussen embraces palpable melody while Draksler shifts cluster chords with vigor. Conversational woodwind/brass interplay concludes the circuit.

Because the music of Hearth is technically unblemished and aesthetically admirable, I hope this is the first of many records to come.