Jerko Jurin Quartet: Deceptive Simplicity

Speaking of Jurin’s music, it is clear at first listen that his natural habitat lies within the realm of the so-called post-genre (another “post”!) Zagreb scene, somewhere at the intersections with club music, electronics, metal, post-rock, and so on, where jazz serves as the main road cutting across the map of his vocabularies and interests.

The album Deceptive Simplicity is the result of that transition into a group of equal musicians, in which the leader’s name speaks more of the origins of the band and the core from which the music grew than of the hegemony of a single musician. After all, these are strong musical personalities who participate in shaping the collective sound in the subtlest of ways. This applies equally to the two explosive guitarists, Jovanović and Čapeta, and to the composed Kralj, who seamlessly incorporates his distinctive synthesizer-shaped bass sound, proven in Trokut, into this context as well, with the addition of one particularly striking performance on double bass. In terms of authorial contribution to the album, Jovanović and Čapeta played a prominent role, both of whom certainly rank among the most exciting instrumentalists on the Croatian scene – the former as an important participant in the experimental and improvised scene, the latter as a member of numerous significant post-genre bands and collectives. The two of them also built into the sound of this ensemble a treasury of guitar genre heritage, from metal to grunge. In principle, the album is a set of fragments that all members, in different variations, dismantled, broke apart, permuted, and reassembled into a simultaneously fragmented and unusually coherent mosaic whole. (Lujo Parežanin, excerpt from a commentary)

Croatian Composers’ Society, Cantus Ltd., 2024.
88924507892