Jazz
Grupo Elegua Records · 28 September 2026
“New World Order”, six oh eight, settles in twenty seconds who runs this record and who moves it. Moses Boyd and Daniel Casimir come in on a pulse that never lets up, and Kevin Haynes’s alto lands on top of it with a quick, biting attack that explains the nickname he has been given, the African Charlie Parker. Deschanel Gordon takes over at the piano, and when the saxophone returns it is in a calmer, more lyrical mood, which is how the track is brought to a close.
“Su Bedding Wedding Ya”, six fifteen, is the one track that manages to hold the song and the drum at the same time. It has a saxophone melody you can sing, a samba-ish lilt that carries the piece along on its own and a real conversation between Gordon, Boyd and Casimir in the middle of it; and it ends, with no forced transition, on African drums alone. “Dahomey”, named after the country Benin was until the mid-seventies, keeps the energy up and gives each musician room, closing on Boyd proving he can play quietly. On “Agenda 2022-2030”, Joe Armon-Jones comes in on keys and the colour changes completely.
The album is called “Inner Outer Alignment Vol. 1” and does not contain the piece “Inner Outer Alignment”, which Haynes was already playing live at the Camden Club in London in the summer of 2025, and it closes with “Oriki Orunmila”, seven fifty-eight, the longest of the five, which drops the quartet and keeps only voice and percussion. Seen from inside the Yoruba tradition, that oriki is a good place to finish. Seen as a record, these are thirty-one minutes that pull apart at the end the two halves the previous four tracks had managed to stitch together.
Haynes did not come to the batá drum in passing: he is an ordained Ifá priest, he divides his time between the UK and Benin, he started out in the eighties on drums and percussion in the Jazz Warriors Big Band, and on stage he opens the night with three batá drummers before playing a note of saxophone. On the record, that side of his world arrives split up: present throughout in the rhythm of every track, foregrounded only on the last one. The “Vol. 1” in the title suggests a second instalment is coming, and this one leaves the feeling of excellent material still waiting for its full album.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents