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Affinity Suite

by Root Strata

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about

And The Bridge Is Love

Affinity Suite is the third recording from the Root Strata duo of Geoff Hearn and Simon Robinson. It follows the excellent The Secret Of Root Strata from 2011 and the equally remarkable Deep Song of 2019-20 – a recording which my 5-star Jazz Journal review deemed some of the best post-CODONA music I had heard.

Their latest release finds Hearn and Robinson moving into some very special territory. Through-composed by Robinson, Affinity Suite features improvisations from Hearn, mostly achieved on the first take, which were played over Robinson's pre-recorded textures and figures. And what textures, figures and improvisations they are!

While the music is in some ways as related to jazz as it is to certain aspects of contemporary classical music – think of Keith Jarrett's Arbour Zena or Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa – from first note to last Affinity Suite establishes its own identity, its own poetics. There is no trace, for example, of the finger-clicking swing, classic blues or AABA popular song forms such as are to be found on the Oscar Peterson Trio's Affinity of 1962. In fact, it is hard to discern in Affinity Suite any conventional evidence at all of either any governing rhythmic framework or congruent matters of thematic exposition, development and recapitulation.

We have instead a most subtle, shimmering and floating range of related yet shape-shifting “soundscapes”. For the most part contemplative and tender in nature, they include some relatively dramatic moments towards the latter stages of Parts 2 and 4. A poetry of sound, texture and dynamics is everything in music where the modernist maxim “less is more” acquires an unspecified yet unmistakable spiritual overtone.

Hearn's soulful, deep and spacious tenor, his wondrous “breathing” quality of patiently cast and questing phrase, complements perfectly the limpid, sometimes chromatically flecked resonance of Robinson's adroit blend of acoustic and electronically generated elements. The interplay which he achieves here of a distilled or minimised jazz pulse with a range of sometimes “sliding” choral and string sonorities, emerging as from some distant yet intimate reverie of threnody and threshold, is such as to raise the hairs on the back of one's neck.

......The word “ affinity” signifies empathy and connection, or relatedness. It might seem only natural to seek to discern all such in the 24/7 world which can so easily come to monopolise our attention today. But there is much in the radically slowed-down ethos of this profoundly wrought music – its understated yet compelling liminal mystery – which induces acknowledgement of the larger qualities we might ascribe to this crucial word: qualities which the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder caught in his long-noted remark that, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Listen to – and marvel at – the love that is Affinity Suite.

Michael Tucker

credits

released December 15, 2021

Geoff Hearn - Tenor Saxophone
Simon Robinson - Keyboards, Electronics, Sound Design
Produced - Geoff Hearn and Simon Robinson at Laughing Dove Studios May 2021
Cover Painting - Michael Tucker
Cover Design - Simon Robinson

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about

Root Strata England, UK

Based in Sussex UK Geoff is one of Britain’s most vibrant musicians on the creative music scene and has led many bands blues, jazz, rock, world, and ‘free improvisation’.
Simon, a pianist, composer and arranger is a well respected member of the live music scene in the UK South East. He has a deep love of post bop jazz, plays regular live jazz gigs and a love of sound design and producing.
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