I Hold the Lion's Paw - Potentially Interesting Jazz Music

Potentially Interesting Jazz Music is the third studio album by Melbourne improvising unit I Hold the Lion’s Paw (IHTLP), following on from Abstract Playgrounds (2018), and Lost in Place (2021). (There has been a steady trickle of singles, Eps, live albums, bootlegs in between, but that’s another story). Three albums, seven years, it points to a measured and considered output. Clearly, no-one’s rushing the end zone here.

In previous incarnations, IHTLP was a loose, free-floating ensemble, drawing on a rotating cast of musicians, the exact number never fixed. It merely expanded, or warped as needed. The ensemble’s ever-changing palette was simply at the beck and call of trumpeter Reuben Lewis’s foundational vision, emphasising elasticity, and malleability. The upshot was a music that constantly morphed, a psychedelic hubbub of shape-shifting sounds, stretched or compressed at will, woven into endlessly mutating patterns, constantly evolving.

That was then, this is now. In recent years, IHTLP has bedded itself into a stable quartet: Reuben Lewis, Emily Bennett, Adam Halliwell, Ronny Ferella. But there is nothing stable about this new manifestation, it’s as bold and capricious as ever, forward-thinking and forward-looking. At the same time, IHTLP continues to draw nourishment from the radical past, cherry-picking and re-purposing scraps and slivers from a rag bag of forebears: Ornette, Don Cherry, Miles, Sun Ra, Laurie Anderson, Jon Hassell.

But here the palette has undergone a subtle shift, marked by an expanded use of electronics and synths, spoken word, voice. Added to which, a propensity for murky undercurrents, abrupt jump cuts, concentrated layering, coupled with a sustained urgency. It’s right there at the outset, on ‘Level Check / Voodoo’, when guest artist, poet Tariro Mavondo recites have you ever tensed your jaw so tight, held your breath so long, because you believe you didn’t deserve the blessing knocking at your ribcage to be let in… These words, intoned breathlessly, presage an untrammelled, five-minute, stream-of-consciousness ride, underscored by a subliminal electronic pulse, as resolute – and unsettling – as a heartbeat in overdrive. Tariro’s poem leaps from idea to idea, variously landing on fear, teeth, genocide, the sacred, unfolding like a grim warning, a countdown to midnight, flush with disquiet and dread.

One thing that is beyond doubt: this quartet version of IHTLP is tight, the upshot of hours spent playing together, improvising, building trust, developing synchronicity, mapping a shared vision. It reflects the band’s readiness for the hard grind, paired with IHTLP’s investigations into durational performance: the daily, four-hour provocations at Mona Foma in 2023, or the recent nation-wide interactive concerts, a cross between Play-School and Café Voltaire, played before an audience of kids via the Musica Viva Australia in Schools Program. Those same kids’ voices can be heard on the intro to ‘Prime Time’, infectiously chanting I hold the lion’s paw before Halliwell’s bass groove kicks in, launching seven-minutes of Lewis’s spaced-out, trippy trumpet, meted out over Bennett’s weirded-out synths, and Ferella’s metronomic beats.

Emily Bennett steps to the fore on the brief ‘Thank You’, her repetitive chant, interspersed with nonsensical phrases – I’ll have what she’s having; Oh honey it’s too cold – declared in mock Strine over a backdrop of percussion and bass. It acts like a teaser for ‘Mechanical Ghosts’, a piece fashioned from sporadic electronics, drums, and slow-burn, eerie trumpet, conjuring darkened landscapes, dreams and chimeras.