Simon Nabatov

• DIGIPACK EDITION

Language becomes a spellbinding repository for intoxicating revelation and cryptic imagery on Verbs, the latest full-length from the remarkable Russian-American pianist Simon Nabatov, a stunning release augmenting his already notable Clean Feed catalogue including this year’s Tender Mercies with German reedist Frank Gratkowski.

Spearheading his augmented Cologne-based 3+2 quintet, featuring new recruits Leonhard Huhn and Phillip Zoubek, alongside familiar trio members Stefan Schönegg and Dominik Mahnig, Nabatov interprets a series of urging semantics as programmatic springboards for glorious spontaneous invention, a lexical calls-to-arms instigating disparate, virtuosic responses; titular signifiers doubling-up as mood-indicators, signalling variances in tempo, pitch, tone and timbre.

Each of the album’s seven dynamic cuts – all collective improvisations, with the exception of Nabatov’s ‘Breathe’ – harbours an enigmatic sting in the tale, the quintet scrying for inscrutable layers of additional meaning behind their original impetus, setting in motion a succession of curve-balling epiphanies, alternating between splendid repose and febrile animation.

From the flickering embers of the plaintively purring ‘Prayer’ and hyper-kinetic, fragmented urgency of ‘Race’, to ‘Evolve’’s mangled retro-futurist bustle and the tentative blooms of the shuffling, ever-ripening ‘Reveal’, Nabatov and his fearless crew of cryptographers set out their mystery-laden credos like a kabbalistic bill-of-fare to be incrementally decoded with each successive listen

PERSONNEL:

• Leonhard Huhn - (alto saxophone, clarinet)
• Philip Zoubek - (synthesizers)
• Simon Nabatov - (piano)
• Stefan Schönegg - (double bass)
• Dominik Mahnig - (drums)

Recorded October 1, 2022, at the LOFT, Cologne, Germany

TRACKS:

• 01) Pray
• 02) Race
• 03) Reveal
• 04) Breathe
• 05) Converge
• 06) Evolve
• 07) Float