Young Star - Juno
Jazzland are proud to present "Young Star", the brand new album by the quintet that is Juno. It is an ambitious, virtuoso, energized and energizing album, packed to the brim with novel approaches to musical styles, genres, arrangements, composition and improvisation.
Once, in the somewhat dim but not so distant past, parents might have lamented to their teenage sons and daughters, "WHAT are you listening to?" bewildered by the new sounds emerging from their offspring's room. In those days, it was seemingly easy to give a valid answer (albeit equally incomprehensible to the parents who left, wondering what, exactly, was hip hop or black metal or whatever music of choice resounded through the walls and doors). Juno are a prime example of why such a scenario might soon be forgotten, because there is no single answer that covers what they do, no genre that adequately describes or explains it.
Various and multiple species of jazz permeate and infiltrate rock, hip hop, soul, expressionistic abstraction, ambient, pop, swing, R n B, baroque choral, and countless other elements that would normally have no business being within the same zip code. Or maybe these disparate sonic and stylistic components are infiltrating jazz? It's almost impossible to tell. And this isn't just across the breadth of the album: this is often happening within individual tracks, not in series but in parallel. The plethora of different musical DNA samples have been spliced, melded, merged and blended within the collective mind of the group so comprehensively that the old cry of "WHAT are you listening to?" can only be given a singular valid answer: JUNO.