MoonJune 2025
Javanese voyager ventures into Hellenic environment to cast his spell on unsuspecting locals.
Anagnorisis
A full decade after "So Far So Close" became Dwiki Dharmawan’s international debut, his further advances into the cosmos of MoonJune Records keep on bringing savory fruits, and if the Indonesian pianist didn’t turn into a proper star yet, it’s because of Dharmawan’s unwillingness to stop and dwell in a single space for any amount of time. Commanding the respect of peers and listeners all over the world, Dwiki’s always on the move towards new horizons, and “Anagnorisis – which means “recognition” in Greek: this platter was laid down in Athens, in the company of local musicians and stellar reedman Gilad Atzmon – is a perfect example of his constant attempts to merge Eastern and Western idioms. Not that his usual alchemical experiments are on display here and that the twain will meet; while about a third of the album has a distinct exotic flavor, most of its pieces adhere to a European sort of fusion.
Not that it mattered, what with epic “Gambang Ney” immersing the audience into a tropical soundscape where delicate splashes of Dharmawan’s ivories and velvet strands of Harris Lambrakis’s ney get fleshed out when weaves of Atzmon’s clarinet join in – sensually, to a spellbinding effect, underpinned by Kimon Karoutzos’s contrabass and Nikos Sidirokastritis’s drums, which deliver robust solos at the end. Almost imperceptibly, the swirling Javanese tunes straighten, and once the sparkling passages of Vironas Ntolas’s electric guitar emerge to bolster the sonic image, the jive and groove lose their foreign feel and seem more classical, albeit equally audacious in terms of melody and dynamics, only to see the melancholic Gypsy-jazz patterns of the titular finale tied into gentle jungle-like motifs of increasingly panoramic wildness. This is not surprising, though, since “Ya Kita Bisa” offers quite a few rocking riffs before going off on an improv tangent and refracting the performers’ fun through a flurry of jovial moments until “Pacu Javi” brings forth quieter reflection and a brief quote from Gershwin, picks up speed again and jarringly dissolves impetus in the chamber storm of “Perjuangan” – beautiful to the point of heartbreak.
Developing in a different way, the massive movements of “Timun Mas” and “Lima Dadakan” are hidden under these numbers’ elegiac-blue surface, but it’s there that the genuine emotional weight lies. So “Kereta Keren” may tighten the flow and create the sense of timeless flights of fantasy, but “Jazz For Freeport” and “Toledo Trane” roll the trad calendar even deeper into the past, letting Dwiki’s keys and Gilad’s sax stage a Coltrane/Monk exchange and allowing Vironas’s six strings to twang with a lot of gusto. “Anagnorisis” is a thread of gems which never cease to amaze.
*****
