Nicolas Kummert: La Diversité – West African celebration without the cliche

Belgian saxophonist Nicolas Kummert grabs the post-genre zeitgeist with both hands on his paean to diversity. A longtime student of west African music, Kummert's alliance with acclaimed Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke is an ongoing, free-flowing conversation that skirts past the usual cliches of jazz-meets-Africa, so La Diversité is not some hyphenated mutant genre, but a distillation of collective experience and influences into something personal and open. Fourteen tracks – many of them pared-back duo conversations, others more expansive quartet pieces with Belgian bassist Nicolas Thys and Canadian drummer Karl Jannuska – blend soft, catchy melodies and earthy, hypnotic grooves, with distant, entirely understandable echoes of the great Paul Motian trio. editionrecords.com