Atmospheric is the first word that comes to mind when The Glass Frog plays its first notes. Reverb creates width and depth, generates space and fullness, and that alone is charming. Foat has collected ten tracks on The Glass Frog. All of them are what you would call radio-friendly, i.e. around four minutes long. They are unobtrusive and could also be played in the background of a semi-dark hotel bar, but that would be a waste.

Sea of Tranquility greets the listener with gentle synthesiser sounds, which are joined by a saxophone, together with drums that seem to be played with felt mallets. So the mood is gentle, as are the harmonies, not to mention the structure. Ambient or smooth jazz without vocals? The label speaks of space jazz, elsewhere you read about cosmic jazz, but the categorisation is not really important. The main thing is that the mood works. And it does.

Foat, the British pianist and producer, chooses the prelude as his compass and continues the album with the same habitus. Sure, he varies, African percussionists seem to be involved in the title track The Glass Frog, while a tenor and a soprano saxophone engage in a small acoustic skirmish before a Hammond organ coughs its opinion into the soundscape.

Although it would have been possible to record the album as a solo project, Foat has opted to join forces with a number of musicians. Trevor Walker plays trumpet and flugelhorn, Art Themen plays soprano and tenor saxophone. Binker Golding and Idris Rahman are also among the tenor saxophonists on the album. Daniel Casimier is the bassist and Ayo Salawu plays drums. Baldomero Verdu Frias, Henry Bravo and Orlando Gomez are responsible for percussion. The album benefits from its personnel, as the flow and authenticity are noticeably superior to the synthetic solo efforts of various multi-instrumentalists.

Recorded in just two days, The Glass Frog is an astonishingly complete album. It keeps the mood in suspense for the entire 42 minutes without becoming banal or boring. The diverse structure of the tracks, the various genre mixes and, last but not least, the joy of playing, as presented magnificently in Movilinium, for example, whet the appetite for more atmospheric jazz in space, which places the instruments on stage in a structured manner while the synthesisers create cathedrals.

An exciting album. (Thomas Semmler, HighResMac)

Greg Foat