Jazz pianist Greg Foat brings Symphonie Pacifique, his latest masterful concoction of jazz, library music and pastoral composition, to Strut Records

The room is filled to the brim with cultural artefacts, abandoned or lost. Each object once held special significance to someone and may yet perform that role again for another. But for now they sit and wait. Dimensionally unstable, what you grudgingly continue to consider as a room seems to contract or expand at will. Run your eyes across the space and it stretches out, offering ever more items of potential interest. Once your eye catches something and you lean in towards it, the walls wrap around you like a blanket, so that you are made to give said item your undivided attention. It is a strangely inviting place to get lost in. Listening to Greg Foat’s Symphonie Pacifique is akin to spending time in that almost-room.

This is UK jazz pianist Foat’s first album for the Strut label, following multiple releases for Athens of the North and Jazzman. The pieces that constitute Symphonie Pacifique work gently against the listener’s consciousness, leaving an indelible impression that deepens over time. Dusty library music compilations and sensual jazz arrangements are combined with subtle analogue electronics, strings and choir. There’s both an insularity and an expansiveness at play throughout.

The title track kicks open the door upon lush jazz soundscapes, Foat’s piano finding pathways into the familiarly unknown. Whereas “Anticipation” introduces itself as an ambient cousin to early Detroit techno before embracing free-form saxophone moves; the tonal shifts are masterfully navigated. Elsewhere, “Man vs Machine” strips down Kraftwerkian synthwork while underpinning its repetitive hook with the sort of drumming that doubles up as hip hop break – think a more restrained take on the percussive elements of “Futterman’s Rule” by the Beastie Boys.

“Before the Storm” is an achingly beautiful string-led vision with real cinematic weight behind it, somewhere along a continuum that includes Max Richter’s Woolf Works. Ocean prologue over, Foat’s particular symphonic vision is then allowed space to flourish across eight and a half minutes with the majestic “After the Storm”. It is here that fellow traveller and sometimes-labelmate (on Athens of the North) Andrew Wasylyk springs to mind. A reflective pastoral journey, the piece essays complex emotive forces as untameable as the waters which it evokes. “After the Storm” thus provides a standout moment in a collection that conjures pasts, presents and futures for the listener to fall in and out of.

Greg Foat Bandcamp

Stewart Gardiner
Latest posts by Stewart Gardiner (see all)