Before Words by Polyglot

AUS/JPN trio Polyglot announces Before Words - the latest instalment in a longstanding musical dialogue drawing on influences from contemporary jazz to the traditional music of Japan, India, Mongolia and Vietnam.

Recorded across two sessions at Tokyo’s Studio Dede in 2023 and 2024, Before Words captures both the trio’s rare improvisatory rapport, compositional prowess and deeply immersed cultural research of its individual members. As the Program Leader for Jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, pianist Steve Barry (AUS/NZL) has spent extended periods in Vietnam since 2022 in a growing teaching, performance and research partnership with the National Academy of Music in Hanoi, resulting sold out performances and new collaborative works with Vietnamese musicians Nguyen Thanh Thuy (dan tranh) and Ngo Tra My (dan bau). Drummer Ko Omura (JPN) has made an annual pilgrimage to Mumbai, India since 2013 as a student of internationally acclaimed tabla phenomenon, Pandit Yogesh Samsi. For bassist Kosuke Ochiai (JPN), an initial trip to Mongolia in 2021 sparked a profound love and ongoing study of the remote country’s ancient musical and oral traditions.

Omura expands:
India has opened my eyes to many aspects of life. My journey commenced 12years ago for an urge to discover and study about the rhythms of tabla, which led me to unlock paths to ancient wisdom of the Indian subcontinent. I feel I am in the stream of infinite knowledge, trying to gather a bucketful each time to drink out of it and learn as much as I can. I gaze back at the time past, yet to realize the journey has just begun.

As Polyglot’s sophomore release, Before Words most fully realises the ambition embodied in the ensemble’s name: to seek universal truths and shared spaces between the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the secular — and, more recently, the organic and the artificial. Here, the goatskin drum heads of the tabla and the horsetail strings of the morin khuur fiddle are juxtaposed by the metallic strings of the grand piano - the stalwart instrument of jazz and Western classical music defined by the industrious inflexibility of its equal-tempered pitch.

Ochiai reflects on the fiddle’s role in Mongolian folk traditions:
The Morin Khuur produces rich overtones that remind listeners of the natural cycles of life and Tenger (the sacred sky or divine nature in Mongolian belief). Among nomadic people, it is traditionally played in prayers for their horses’ birth and upbringing, for rainfall, and for the arrival of spring.

Barry, Ochiai and Omura manage to coax out these evocations in the sonic and stylistic resonances between the three instruments, bouncing rhythmically between influences and instrumentations over the album’s 15 tracks.

The opening three pieces set up the theme for the record. Deep Sea Chimney evokes the bubbling hydrothermal plumes that play a vital role in ocean biogeochemistry. Mr Horse Visits Ikoma introduces the ghostly timbres of the morin khuur set against the tabla’s chatty underpinning, while the piano keeps things rooted in the earth with Barry’s lower register interjections. Jyoti sees the ensemble turn to their shared roots in contemporary jazz, with Omura’s composition laying the foundations to highlight the trio’s organic simpatico.

As the album unfolds the Omura and Ochiai swap between instruments as the characters of each piece unfurl over each other, transporting the listener from the Mongolian steppes to the the glistening, icy tundra of Now is Never the Unknown, Quasimodo’s homage to jazz pioneers Thelonious Monk and the late bassist Mario Pavone, and concluding with a visit to the Shinto god of lightning, thunder and storms in Raijin Jinja.

Across its 78 minutes, Before Words showcases Polyglot’s rare conversational fluency and the many syntheses of the musical languages of its three members. At a time of significant social upheaval and fractious international diplomacy, Before Words offers a gentle reminder of the possibilities of patient, curious dialogue to forge new understandings and shared values.

Steve Barry (PhD) is a pianist, organist, composer and improviser and the Program Leader for Jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

He is the recipient of numerous awards including an APRA Professional Development Award and the Bell Award for Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year.

stevebarrymusic.com
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