Afro 7 Vinyl & CDs

Review: A Leeds jazz five-piece with a film musical feel, Mu Quintet share their latest LP, which develops their modal and melodic jazz kerns and serifs, spelling out the Biblical name “Enos" in eight-track album form. Following up their Jazzaggression debut, Summit, from 2023 - which aimed at a freer set of celeritous jazz beatitudes - Enos is more measured and expressionistic by comparison. Doomy, stringy downturns pockmark the record’s otherwise merrier movements, a precedent set on the opening ‘Enos’, which couldn’t possibly predict the strutting, and perhaps relatively traditional modal swing that follows on ‘Drunk In The Morning’. We reach a funereal nadir on ‘Collapse’, while a well-mourned *bon viveur* is circumscribed on ‘Rich Man Blues’, the fullest and most enjoyable track on the LP. Very little studio trickery, synth histrionics or extra FX are required of Mu to lend their music a cosmic, larger-than-its-parts feel; the progressions alone handle the task well.