Hooray! Spinifex, one of my favorite contemporary Avantgarde Jazz groups is back with the successor to last year's album "Undrilling the Hole".
SPINIFEX - Maxximus (CD) (2025)
With the Amsterdam-based international ensemble you never really know what kind of punky, funky, oriental or whatever kind of Jazz Fusion you'll get. But it will always be a flawlessly executed wild ride. Sometimes the sextet around leader and saxophone player Tobias Klein grows to a bigger band, like on the sensational 2022 "Spinifex Sings" album featuring two vocalists or on their 2015 release "Maximus".
Ten years later Spinifex add an extra X to that album title and return with another extended line-up featuring Jessica Pavone and Elisabeth Coudoux on viola resp. cello and Evi Filppou on vibraphone and percussion. That's already great news, because the Modern Jazz Quartet and Eric Dolphy fan in me just loves those good vibes in his Jazz. And who doesn't appreciate strings? Seriously, do you have no soul? Or never heard Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Inner Mounting Flame"?
With five of its six tracks beyond the ten minute mark (and the sixth only insignificantly below it) "Maxximus" is filled to the brim with material from minimalist to exuberant arrangements, from easily digestable, downright catchy stuff to absolutely crazy experimental excursions, but absolutely no dull moment between those poles.
The special sauce of this album however is that despite the XXL line-up Spinifex aren't going full more is more, but instead pull the plug:
Gonçalo Almeida doesn't play electric but upright bass, and Jasper Stadhouders mostly switches to acoustic guitar too, while the brass players switch up their instruments as well: From saxophone to bass clarinet, from tenor to bass clarinet and from regular to piccolo trumpet.
So you won't find any heavy guitar riffs or traces of Jazzcore like it could appear on "Spinifex Beats the Plague" or "Undrilling The Hole" here. Well, at least not in the expected form! This album actually has similarly wild ideas, but presents them in a different, more intimate space which mostly utilizes the tools of Chamber Music and pre-electric Jazz while also acknowledging Fusion and all kinds of noisy weirdness that arrived afterwards.
"Maxximus" feels very nostalgic and traditional in the best way, without exclusively drawing inspiration from just one specific era. A timeless Best of Jazz, but still very much from our time. Ok, now it feels like I'm beginning to run in circles. So let's finish this review before I get dizzy!
So while every single magnificent track would deserve its own paragraph of praise here, I will only highlight the final piece, which conceptually just cannot be ignored. "The Privilege of Playing the Wrong Notes" is a nine and a half minutes long study of exactly that. But everyone who's not a complete noob knows that there really are no wrong notes, it just depends on how you're using them. And so what should be a permanent and repeated offense against all harmonic rules actually works in a stunningly convincing matter.
But honestly, after you've heard the full hour of greatness preceeding the last track, that's not actually a surprise. Conclusion: With a Jazz highlight of the year Spinifex rules supreme once more.
Ten years later Spinifex add an extra X to that album title and return with another extended line-up featuring Jessica Pavone and Elisabeth Coudoux on viola resp. cello and Evi Filppou on vibraphone and percussion. That's already great news, because the Modern Jazz Quartet and Eric Dolphy fan in me just loves those good vibes in his Jazz. And who doesn't appreciate strings? Seriously, do you have no soul? Or never heard Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Inner Mounting Flame"?
With five of its six tracks beyond the ten minute mark (and the sixth only insignificantly below it) "Maxximus" is filled to the brim with material from minimalist to exuberant arrangements, from easily digestable, downright catchy stuff to absolutely crazy experimental excursions, but absolutely no dull moment between those poles.
The special sauce of this album however is that despite the XXL line-up Spinifex aren't going full more is more, but instead pull the plug:
Gonçalo Almeida doesn't play electric but upright bass, and Jasper Stadhouders mostly switches to acoustic guitar too, while the brass players switch up their instruments as well: From saxophone to bass clarinet, from tenor to bass clarinet and from regular to piccolo trumpet.
So you won't find any heavy guitar riffs or traces of Jazzcore like it could appear on "Spinifex Beats the Plague" or "Undrilling The Hole" here. Well, at least not in the expected form! This album actually has similarly wild ideas, but presents them in a different, more intimate space which mostly utilizes the tools of Chamber Music and pre-electric Jazz while also acknowledging Fusion and all kinds of noisy weirdness that arrived afterwards.
"Maxximus" feels very nostalgic and traditional in the best way, without exclusively drawing inspiration from just one specific era. A timeless Best of Jazz, but still very much from our time. Ok, now it feels like I'm beginning to run in circles. So let's finish this review before I get dizzy!
So while every single magnificent track would deserve its own paragraph of praise here, I will only highlight the final piece, which conceptually just cannot be ignored. "The Privilege of Playing the Wrong Notes" is a nine and a half minutes long study of exactly that. But everyone who's not a complete noob knows that there really are no wrong notes, it just depends on how you're using them. And so what should be a permanent and repeated offense against all harmonic rules actually works in a stunningly convincing matter.
But honestly, after you've heard the full hour of greatness preceeding the last track, that's not actually a surprise. Conclusion: With a Jazz highlight of the year Spinifex rules supreme once more.
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