Jazz
Dox Records · 16 October 2026
The title of “One Day We’ll Have A Window” is literal: Sam Newbould works in a studio in the basement of Amsterdam’s Volkshotel, with no window at all, and that’s where the album’s twelve tracks came from. It’s the fourth record by the British saxophonist and composer — after “Blencathra” (2019), “Bogus Notus” (2021) and “Homing” (2024) — and Dox Records releases it on 16 October with the quintet he’s been playing with for years: Bernard van Rossum on tenor saxophone, Xavi Torres on piano, Jort Terwijn on double bass and Guy Salamon on drums and percussion, plus Beth Aggett on vocals on several tracks. Newbould plays alto, flute and synthesizer.
“Small movements” opens the album with a bass pulse from Terwijn, Torres’s piano weaving around it and Newbould’s alto coming in with an oddly turned melody; it’s almost eight minutes that grow by accumulation, each instrument taking ground, until Aggett appears wordlessly towards the close. The best thing here, though, is the two saxophones crossing: “Bells of high tide” puts a Latin-flavoured groove under the alto and, when van Rossum’s tenor joins in, the bells in the title are finally audible. That crossing comes back on “Nightfisher” and on “Warp and weft”. “Beeline” is where Salamon does his most inventive work; “Broadside ballad” is Terwijn’s; and the opening of “Long beans” finds Torres a good deal closer to Randy Newman than to any European jazz pianist.
What doesn’t quite add up is the voice. The album is named after a sentence about seeing through the walls that divide us — Newbould explains it that way — and yet, with a human voice in the band, the record uses her as one more colour: Aggett sings without words, woven between the two saxophones as if she were a third wind instrument. It’s a defensible decision and it sounds good, but the one element here that could have said something in words ends up saying nothing. There are also three interludes of a minute or less — one of them the “Warp and weft” reprise, forty-three seconds — that point towards a different album and end up working as hinges.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents