Jazz
Endectomorph Music · 17 July 2026
“Powerpuff Backpack” opens the record with seven minutes for Ron Miles, the trumpeter who died in 2022, and the dedication tells you more about this quintet than any genre tag would. Kenny Warren takes his time. Folk and funk work away underneath, and JP Schlegelmilch’s organ lays down a psych-pop sheen that never quite leaves across the nine tracks.
Slow Tiger are Warren on trumpet, Adam Schneit on alto saxophone and clarinet, Schlegelmilch on organ, Andrew Dow on electric bass and Nathan Ellman-Bell on drums, and the debut follows years of crossing paths in other bands. Everyone but the drummer contributes writing, so the album is shared out between four pens.
The title of “Eleven in Six” isn’t a classroom joke. Ellman-Bell holds a cymbal pulse in eleven while Dow lays an upbeat bass figure in six, and the five and a half minutes are spent finding out what trumpet and clarinet can do over ground that moves two ways at once. Schneit slips in and out of the harmony so easily you barely notice, which is the hard way to do it.
The two pieces that hold up to repeat listening are the ones with a fixed address. “Wharf Street” is named after the street in Portland, Maine where Schneit grew up, a pop tune with a sixties lilt that the two horns hand back and forth over four minutes and twenty seconds. Schlegelmilch’s “Mending the Nets” came out of the enforced pause of the pandemic: a slow waltz on brushes, with church-like organ sustains, and the barest thing here.
The reservation is structural rather than local. Four different composers, and the record still has a single sound, a pleasant one: the organ beds everything in warmth and the two horns lean towards unison, so without the credits you’d struggle to say that “Funhouse”, with its groove in nine, is Dow’s and “Maritime Studies” is Schlegelmilch’s. The faultless flow the band went looking for is both the achievement and the price. It doesn’t help that the album closes on its title track, three and three-quarter minutes of warm R&B, straight after the near ten minutes of “Light Pitcher Fixture”: the ending reads as a fade rather than a conclusion.
Rating: 7/10
Text by Aina Torrents