Album Review: Black Jazz Consortium / ‘Codes and Metaphors’ (Soul People)

Black Jazz Consortium Codes and Metaphors

★★★★☆

At coffee table level it keeps you company during your day-to-day. At tantric level your aura gets a gentle but thorough workout, and at tightly packed/cheek to cheek dance floor level, it’s a show of love occupying its own plain of grooving. Intense out of a conversely subtle framework shaping spirituality — one wispy synth line or string quiver reappearing in the distance makes all the difference — the profound techno elevation of Fred Peterkin lifts you just off the floor, but leaves enough floating room to be felt. See “Even Greater,” doing deep house with shades and tones taking you away before you know it.

Amidst burbling keys, horizontal loosening and jazz flecks played with intuition knowing where and when to fill space and nudge situations along, is machinery keeping strict time. The likes of “Melody Off Key” and “Tokyo Electric” work things out to a tizz of whirring technology, that on balance is less pure than BJC’s chilled agenda, but in its own way completes Peterkin’s picture, providing the transport to faraway oases.

The inevitable Ursula Rucker-ized monologue of “Be An Not Know” is a sound-off you’re not really gonna take onboard, and is an easy timeout for Peterkin to take in an otherwise grand design, guiding with concealed influence. “Love Is” repeats like a subliminal plant, and “Your Love” creates twilight sensuality for when the spotlight frames a dance floor for two.

File under: DJ Qu, Levon Vincent, Jus-Ed

Matt Oliver

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