Title spine damaged by the album pushing through the sleeve and jacket. Cleverly complex yet melodically embraceable, the trio of Beligan pianist residing in Norway, Jonas Cambien's trio with Andre Rolighete on tenor and soprano saxophone and drummer Andreas Wildhagen perform eleven original Cambien compositions, a mix of astute, joyful and irrepressibly creative approaches to jazz and free improvisation.
"The title of this album was found in the 1953 book "The Compleat Angler" by Izaak Walton. The full sentence reads: Nature hath painted the body of the fish with whitish, blackish, brownish spots."-from the liner notes
"Belgian-born, Oslo-based pianist Jonas Cambien couldn't have chosen better partners than Andreas Wildhagen and Andre Roligheten to perform his cleverly constructed compositions. On its third studio album, his trio shows itself as a tightly interacting ensemble, with a free and playful approach. Cambiens compositions often start with simple ideas, never saying too much or too little, paving the way for collective improvisations that can go from explosive and wild to intricate and dreamy. In that way, the music displays a wide range of moods and types of energy.
From the joyful, Ornette-reminiscent "1 000 000 Happy Locusts", to the introspective, repetitive "Bushfire", to the contemporary sounds on "Freeze" that lead up to the stubborn ostinato on "Yoyo Helmut". Throughout the album, the trio is using a variety of sounds and techniques that make the music sound fresh all the way, and full of surprises. Like the prepared piano in dialogue with Wildhagens imaginative percussion on "The Origins of Tool Use", the animal-like sounds evoked by Rolighetens bass clarinet on Herrieschoppers, or the organ on the beautiful, deconstructed ballad "Helium".
On one track, there is no piano at all, but instead a short soprano sax duet played by Roligheten and Cambien, that serves as an intro to the irresistible, trance-like rhythms on Mantis'. In Jonas Cambien Trio's world, nothing is out, nothing is prohibited: the music goes everywhere, including corners you weren't aware of at the start. Unpolished, yet surprisingly accessible, this is free music many will enjoy."-Clean Fee