Ocean Fanfare - "Third Nature"

Ocean Fanfare

Sven Dam Meinild - Alto & Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet
Tomasz Dąbrowski - Trumpet
Richard Andersson - Double Bass
Peter Bruun - Drums

Album's title: "Third Nature"

Label: Barefoot Records (Denmark, 2026)

Album's link: https://barefootrecords.bandcamp.com/album/third-nature

Review author: Viačeslavas Gliožeris

I started a sunny July morning in my cherry-red Jeep Cherokee with 83-year-young Sir Mick Jagger singing “Mr. Charm” on the radio:

….

When I was oh-so-young, I used to want to go to Mars

And burn the rubber on the road

And drive around in fancy cars

And who would take you into space?

Who would you really trust?

Is it Boeing, is it NASA, is it mad mogul Mr. Musk?

Now I'm older, I would like to ask you if tonight

We could stay at home, you see, I'm really quite polite

…

What a danceable and burning piece!

…

Life's too short for just making money

Show me how to spend it with you, honey

Life's too short to waste it living on your own, come on

Life's too short, nothing lasts forever

Can't be bought, help me bring you pleasure

Life's too short to waste it living all alone, ahhh!

Call me Mr. Charm

...

As a teenager, I was all in Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple; the Stones... were just a bunch of old men for me. Old-fashioned. Non-contemporary. Stacked in the past.

As usual for a Baltic summer, the afternoon brings the clouds and boring rain. Just the right time to stay at home and listen to something … melancholic. I had never heard Ocean Fanfare's music before; still, their Scandinavian-Polish roots, the album's title and black-and-white cover with a lonely pine-tree pic all signaled that their music would be very ECM-like Nordic aerial jazz. Exactly what fits perfectly for a day like this.

And - I was totally wrong. Ocean Fanfare didn't play Nordic chamber jazz at all. The album's opener, “Kritisk Stadie”, sounded like a minimalist, simplified version of contemporary NYC creative jazz with a groovy rhythm section and free-soloing reeds. From the short liner notes on the cover, I found out that the quartet's “Third Nature” is a third and final release in a series, titled “Nature Trilogy”, inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book.

Naturally, I needed to learn more about the book itself. No, I didn't read the book titled “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins“ (an excellent title for a future Otomo Yoshihide guitar noise album – he had much longer and more knotted titles, though). Since my early twenties, I don't really read any literature that radiates sofa-activist ideas; with age I developed a strong allergy to esoteric and leftist propaganda of any form. But I did read a few book’s reviews to understand what it is about.

In brief, what one of the reviewers wrote about the book:

“Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World is a rich multispecies ethnography, traces the growth of a particular kind of Mushroom (matsutake mushroom) in the age of capitalism, and in a way emphasises on the relation between humans and nonhuman beings that go into matsutake mushroom foraging, exporting, and consumption....

...Growing particularly in human-disturbed forests, which in the book are explained as fallouts of capitalism, matsutake mushrooms show resilience and the lateral relations amongst various species – be it humans, red pine trees, fungi and nematodes. This approach, which focuses on interactive relations among humans and nonhumans allows the readers to rethink ideas of rationalisations, wherein nonhumans are subordinated by human activities....”

from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015): A Review by Sampurna Das (2021)

Leaving semi-academic topics aside, let's return to the Ocean Fanfare's music. Since there are no lyrics, the book's influence can be felt in the compositions' titles and in the common music aesthetics.

An all-acoustic quartet with two reed players – Polish trumpeter Tomasz Dąbrowski and Danish sax/clarinet player Sven Dam Meinild - on the front, often playing unison. The band plays a well-balanced mixture of composed and improvised avant-garde jazz. Perfectly recorded at Swedish Tambourine studios (modern post-industrial technologies, man!), the album's music demonstrates two obvious sources of inspiration. The first comes right from the heart of the post-industrial world, the NYC avant-garde jazz scene. The other is Nordic (and Central European) folk. Low-to-mid-tempo organic tunes are a bit melancholic, groovy, and surprisingly static at the very same time. Most probably, conceptually minimalist and partially simplified, they build a sad, boggy atmosphere, with a few sparks, but without the light at the end of the tunnel. Probably, the book's theme influenced the trilogy's concept that way. Still, there is a feeling that you're waiting for something to happen soon, but nothing happens. And that way goes until the end. The music tells the listener the open-ended story and leaves him without answers. In a black-and-white world without colors, probably – without hope.

I seriously doubt if Mick Jagger ever fought on the streets; still, his “Street Fighting Man” was one of the hymns of the generation. I personally never fought either. Already in his forties, Jagger sang on “Primitive Cool”:

…

Did you walk cool in the fifties, daddy?

Was it all black and white?

Did you play jazz all night?

Was it really so wonderful?

…

And did you walk cool in the sixties, Daddy?

And did you fight in the war?

Did you break all the laws?

That were ready to crumble?

…

We didn't fight on the streets. We were just dreamers. Sir Mick Jagger is still dreaming. And his dreams are colored, as always.