Jessica Lauren - Four

Originally released on Freestyle Records, Jessica Lauren Four now joins the IMPRESS!VE Collective / BBE Music catalogue, further extending the long-standing creative relationship between Jessica and A&R Greg Boraman, which also saw the first ever vinyl release of her stunning, long lost album film in 2024.

Since the early 1990s, keyboard player Jessica Lauren’s soulful, spacious jazz grooves have been a distinctive presence within London’s alternative music scene. Over the following decades, she has released four albums under her own name, as well as playing with space jazz collectives The Heliocentrics and Emanative, woodwind virtuosos Tamar Osborn (Collocutor) and Chip Wickham (Gondwana Records), clarinettist Arun Ghosh and many more.

After the bold and innovative multi-layered jazztronica of film, Jessica Lauren Four presents a largely acoustic setting for Lauren’s richly varied musical language, drawing together blues, soul, jazz, Afro-Cuban rhythm, and the spacious sensibility of acoustic, ambient music.

Opener ‘White Mountain’ is a hypnotic exercise in restraint, where contemporary jazz and minimalism meet in an unusually open and beautifully measured performance.

Legendary vocalist Jocelyn Brown appears twice: ‘Happiness Train’ is a fierce rolling rhythm and blues workout that gives Brown room to stretch out, while ‘I Believe’ brings gospel-inflected soul to Jessica’s tender piano and organ accompaniment.

With bassist Andrew Kremer and percussionists David ‘Booie’ Gallagher and Paul Gunter, Lauren moves effortlessly from the Latin pulse of ‘Vaya Con Dios’ and swinging ‘Gangaman’ to the insistent ‘The Name Of Fela Will Always Stand For Freedom’. Throughout, the quartet play with restraint, heart, and a rare collaborative instinct, always placing the music first.

Tracklist
1. White Mountain
2. Vaya Con Dios
3. Happiness Train
4. Mel Benson
5. Gangaman
6. Dogtown
7. The Name Of Fela Will Always Stand For Freedom
8. I Believe
9. Swamp Thing
10. Mr. G