9/10
Alina Bzhezhinska, harp, with Hip Harp Collective. BBE Music, 2022.
Ukrainian-born, London-based harpist Alina Bzhezhinska is very busy these days creating her own brand of jazz and funk. Still, she’s carved out time to fundraise for her native country, including curating a show this past August at the Birmingham@the B Music Jazz Festival and even driving in a convoy of trucks to deliver much-needed goods. There’s something in that can-do tenaciousness that infects the music in her outstanding new album, Reflections. Joined by the HipHarpCollective as well as some of Britain’s finest, this album is filled with innovation, spirit, and pure delight.
Beginning with a look back to Dorothy Ashby’s “Soul Vibrations,” Bzhezhinska plays with a loose style, her improvisation never pressed or tense, and organically expanding with color in duet with the tasty string playing by Ying Xue. What I like best is how she generously allows the harp to be what it is, blossoming with arpeggios, accenting the off-beats and commenting on what’s happening in the ensemble. This is especially true in her originals, like “For Carrol,” featuring the soulful trumpeter Jay Phelps. Bzhezhinska is not the soloist, and yet her responses to his line have a presence that buoys the drive, demonstrating her ease at jumping from center stage to ensemble.
The title song is especially touching in its simplicity and quiet lyricism, just brushes and harp until bassist Julie Walkington enters on tiptoe, like a pussycat. It’s ethereal and subtle. Likewise, “Paris Sur Le Toit” is offered up in two versions—a sophisticated drive that metamorphoses to rap with SANITY and TomTheyThem in glowing English-accented vocals. Bzhezhinska describes her musical journey as a classically trained harpist becoming entranced with her parents’ record collection. Duke Ellington is honored in a percussive-tinged and mesmerizing “African Flower,” looking inward even as it expands from solo to duet with the impassioned Tony Kofi, sax. Likewise in Coltrane’s “Alabama,” harp and guitar weave a tapestry of color for saxophone to comfortably lay down his melody.
Some of the most exciting music is in a reworking of Joe Henderson’s and Alice Coltrane’s “Fire,” with driving rhythm by Adam Teixeira and Joel Prime plus Bzhezhinska’s deftly articulated solos, aggressively beautiful and continually part of the texture, finally joined expertly by trumpet and sax. A favorite on the album is “Sans End,” written by HipHarpCollective’s bassist Mikele Montolli. Beginning with a perpetual motion ostinato, there’s an exotic feel that slides into funk, the accent on one and three. I dare you not to dance!
