ALAWARI is the Copenhagen-based, international collective sextet that spices its jazz music with punkish thorns. Leviathan is the sophomore album of this band that was founded in 2016, following the self-titled debut album (April, 2022), and it was recorded at Monochrom Studio in Gniewoszów, Poland, in February and March 2024. The sextet features Danish pianist Sune Sunesen Rendtorff, trumpeter Carlo Janusz Becker Adrian, tenor sax player Frederik Engell and drummer Simon Forchhammer, Slovak alto sax player Michela Turcerová (who replaced Danish Asger Uttrup Nissen who played in ALAWARI debut album), Polish double bass player Rafał Różalski (who replaced Danish Jonatan Melby Bak).

Leviathan suggests another side of ALAWARI, contrasting the irreverent, cacophonous reflection of the revolution of the debut album. The new album, after a few changes in the sextet’s musicians, is set on an ambitious, reverent journey to explore spirituality, transformation, and the totality of the human experience, in an atmosphere that swings between symphonic grandeur and intimate vulnerability. ALAWARI attempts to demonstrate that the path to the divine is found through collective unity, a shared experience that transcends the individual.

Rendtorff, Turcerová and Engell composed the music. ALAWARI suggests now a more ritualist and dramatic, classical-influenced orchestrated textures, based on repetitive rhythmic patterns of the closed-miked saxes and the thunderous rhythm section. These pieces diminish aspects of intimacy, modesty and austerity and opt for larger-than-life, almost symphonic textures. I guess that ALAWARI interprets the divine and spirituality as only a bombastic, dense and overwhelming sonic experience.

Personally, and despite ALAWARI’s good intentions, I find it impossible to accept ALAWARI’s evangelical invitation to traverse a landscape of sorrow and joy, pain and exaltation, silence and intensity in such a bombastic atmosphere. But, clearly, my perspective relies on my older age and where I live – Jerusalem, the holy city – where too many wars were fought for an all-encompassing interpretation of the divine and spirituality.

Eyal Hareuveni

Sune Sunesen Rendtorff (piano, synthesizer), Carlo Janusz Becker Adrian (trumpet, flugelhorn), Frederik Engell (tenor saxophone), Michela Turcerová (alto saxophone), Rafał Różalski (double bass), Simon Forchhammer (drums)