London Jazz Music

The Bridge To Total Freedom

Hitting somewhere between Eli Keszler’s offbeat jazz scope and King Britt’s broken beats, Philly native Malk expresses a restless soul in the livewire beats and zig-zagging keys and instrumentation of ‘The Bridge To Total Freedom’. He properly gets inside his thang on highlights including the lokey burner ‘Pete’s Groove’ and scuffed drums and drones of ‘Charlie’s Back Pocket’, with exceptional work in the tension between high velocity drums and calm pads and chords in ‘Rough Sentences’, and the laid-back, latinate hustle of ‘A Link To The Future’. “As with his work with Hip Hop trio Mahatma X and his more electronic hued solo offerings, it's impossible to pin his sound down to any one particular genre. With THE OT X-TET he points his feverish, scattershot productions in a jazz direction, most notably with a respectful nod to Madlib's Yesterday's New Quintet project. After spending a year in London, ostensibly to further his academic career, he immersed himself in the capital's burgeoning new jazz scene and The Bridge To Total Freedom was the result of fevered late night sessions, coalescing in a much more realised and nuanced set of tracks in comparison with his previous outings. Yes, you can call it jazz but this is jazz MALK style. Retaining all the hallmarks of his skittish production style, the eleven tracks that make up the album seamlessly merge live drumming and instrumentation with programmed beats and samples that reference the many oddball memes that preoccupy this talented producer's febrile imagination. From the get go it swings and it grooves with spacey keys sketching the album's multifarious earworms.”