NEW ALBUMS
BLACK FLOWER
Magma SDBAN
Belgian fusionists embark on an immersive electronic voyage.
By John Lewis
8/10
BELGIUM has been the butt of jokes from the Anglophone pop world for decades – Technotronic, the Singing Nun and some hilariously hi-NRG gabba acts being the country’s prime pop exports – but the Belgian jazz scene has a long and noble history. Artists as diverse as Django Reinhardt, Toots Thielemans, Philip Catherine and Marc Moulin have created varieties of jazz quite distinct from anything that was happening in the United States.
Now in the Belgian vanguard are Black Flower, fronted by Nathan Daems, a multi-instrumentalist who started out on the violin and trained to a high level on several reed instruments at the Ghent Conservatory. But he was always looking for music outside the US jazz canon: playing guitar in avant-rock groups, playing various saxophones in reggae and Afrobeat bands, and travelling the world to study non-Western tunings, wind instruments and alternative forms of improvisation.