DOUBLE STANDARD

The musical partnership between Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu and Polish drummer Bodek Janke reaches back over three decades, when the two – still in their school days – together formed their very first bands.
They have collaborated in various constellations, including as a duo, on and off ever since, together appearing on ten albums, combining jazz and other improvisational idioms with a variety of folkloric traditions in what Jazztimes Magazine has dubbed

displays of “visceral excitement and engrossing interplay.”
DOUBLE STANDARD is the first recorded documentation of the duo’s exceptional craft since the 2008 live-album, simply titled Live, which Jazztimes went on to call “a thrilling ride”. On the new EP, Randalu and Janke explore a set of jazz standards from an angular

perspective, dissecting familiar melodies and changes with transfigured time signatures, playful polyrhythms and all the musical intimacy they have been developing for so many years.

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The programme kicks off with “At Last” – Janke and Randalu inject the melody with a rhythmic twist, creating an elastic groove that invites their solos to jump off the page. On the duo’s pass at

Miles Davis’s “So What” there’s little sign left of any cool-jazz. Instead, the familiar melody, sped-up and re-assembled with different note-lengths, gives-way to an intricate piano pattern, from which point the pianist and drummer explore a variety of variations on the established theme, culminating in a thunderous crescendo.

Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” is approached in nine-time, featuring heavy backbeat emphasis and free-wheeling runs across the keys, as Janke inflects the vamp-like tune with shifting

metric designs and full-hearted fills. It is Herbie Hancock after all, who called Kristjan Randalu “a dazzling piano player”, and here Randalu does his virtuoso reputation full justice. The Paul Desmond

standard “Take Five” in the duo’s approach has a four-pulse structured in quintuplets before the B-section introduces the title-lending 5/4 time signature. Randalu and Janke develop the music with fierce snare-work and deep digs into the keys before concluding the proceedings with an oblique rendering of “Blue Bossa”. This particular take was recorded in 2020 – a time when tracking in the same room together was near-impossible, leading to this entire project being recorded remotely. A fact that speaks to the quality of these two protagonists who, even across the distance, are able to create complex and flowing interplay
 

There’s a particularly wide idiomatic range at play in the conversations of this experienced musical team, and the players’ respectively unique instrumental signatures elegantly blend them

together to an energetic, even funk-infused whole that amounts to far more than the sum of its two parts.

DOUBLE STANDARD OUT NOW ON ALL DIGITAL PLATFORMS!