Some years back it looked like there were prospects of an interesting cross-fertilization between alt-country and the weirder fringes of jazz, but I lost hope at some point during Bill Frisell’s depressing slide from brilliance into aw-shucks treacle. It comes as a real pleasure, then, to discover some folks who are going about it the right way. Bite the Gnatze is a Dutch eight-piece band, the brainchild of guitarist/banjoist Paul Pallesen; Wilde dans in een afgelegen Berghut is their third disc after North East South West (Plutones) and Throw the Plates (Trytone/BVHaast). Jazz, country, European folk music and pop music all get thrown into the mix, and the results are good fun but also curiously sweet and tender, with little of the wildeyed lunacy one associates with certain corners of the Dutch scene. There’s a strange dream-epic feel to these pieces, rather like some of Bobby Previte’s 1980s work; the instrumental textures and arrangements are often so arresting – full of perfect little canons, peppery internal dialogues, hazy balladry and scaled-down rock riffs – that one is tempted to concentrate on them rather than the solos, even though the latter are consistently fine. The title-track, which opens the disc, is in many ways its most conventional, a knockout country-swing number recalling “Sweet Georgia Brown”: a brief three-way tussle between Duijves’ bass clarinet, Dijkstra’s soprano sax and the leader’s guitar introduces a spirited violin solo from Le Clercq which would have made Mark O’Connor or Stuart Duncan applaud. Alan Purves’ drumming on this track is wonderfully idiosyncratic; as throughout the album, he seems to have put bells on his drumkit or to be wearing them strapped to his foot (or possibly both!). “Zinder Zoom en zonder end,” by contrast, is a curiously fluctuating canonic structure. Over its ten minutes’ duration there are also some slightly eerie passages for voice, strings and clarinet, and the whole thing builds to a dense climax for lap-steel over a heavy, droning groove. All in all, it’s quite the tour de force. Each track is similarly eventful: “Farne” manages in seven minute to go from soulful fuzzed-out guitar to a whirling jazz/European folk-dance hybrid which wouldn’t disgrace Danny Thompson; “Akkersnacker” bursts out of a gorgeous minor-key chart with some Ornettish freebop from Dijkstra. But there’s no sense of channel-flipping or pastiche: Pallesen and his companions develop, track by track, an aesthetic that’s unmistakably their own. The results sound like nothing else in contemporary music.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, March 2004