With her Landing Ground album in 2012, the young trumpeter/composer Laura Jurd arrived on stage to a volume of cheers most fledgling jazz musicians only dream of hearing. Some of the elements of that quietly confident set (post-60s Miles Davis trumpet phrasing, folk themes, classical music, and a Django Batesian spikiness) are still apparent in the followup, but Irish musician Lauren Kinsella’s vocal agility and poetic lyrics take centre-stage, and the soundworld of Kinsella’s own Thought-Fox group exerts a stronger influence on Jurd’s thinking in this series of songs originally commissioned by the London Jazz festival. Jurd shadows Kinsella’s voice closely, whipping brisk repeating patterns around the compelling lyric of She Knew Him, skimming dramatic trills across raw electric guitar chords that recall John McLaughlin’s effect on Bitches Brew, and an unusual lineup for this project includes that basement-register oddity, the bass saxophone. Being a song-based set leaning more decisively toward folk music and avant-rock than Landing Ground, Human Spirit perhaps diffuses Jurd’s promising personal journey a little, and offers less for her jazz and improv admirers – but she doesn’t think in idiomatic boxes, and this venture is an intriguing reminder of that.
