Exploding Customer - At Tampere Jazz Happening

Nate Dorward, Don't Explain

Second disc by the band with the coolest name in free jazz - if “free jazz” is the right word: it’s world-music freebop you can shake your booty to (”Mr BP(D)”, the opener, could be their big hit if they did Greek or Jewish wedding gigs…), and the whole thing has a supercharged headlong post-punk drive which makes Carlo Actis Dato sound like a shrinking violet. Spirited work from saxophonist Martin Küchen (quivering Brötzmann passion) and trumpet Tomas Hallonsten (sounds like a mainstream post-Hubbard player on a holiday), rock-steady bass from Benjamin Quigley, but inevitably the drummer Kjell Nordeson is virtually the star of the show, one of those hyperreal adrenaline-rush drummers emerging lately from Scandinavia (cf Paal Nilssen-Love and Thomas Strønen). Freebop that’s light on its toes & full of a joy that is the necessary corrective to the bleaker outlook implied by mordant titles like “Peace is Not for Us” and “Too Much Money.”