Let Mystic Suite pull you under. Where Oceanic Suite mapped the tides and Celestial Suitetraced a skyward arc, the third album by Atlantis Jazz Ensemble dives into Hades’ shadowy domain, completing a mythic triptych that runs from sea to heavens to underworld. Drawing on the old Greek tale of Kronos’ sons partitioning the cosmos - Poseidon, Zeus, Hades - the group aligns each realm with a distinct musical climate, arriving here at their most intense, strange and sublimely charged terrain. This is spiritual soul-jazz for an age of permanent crisis: rooted in the 1970s legacies of Strata-East, Tribe and Black Jazz, yet sharpened by the restlessness of today’s jazz underground, searching relentlessly for meaning in a world that feels perpetually off its axis.
The suite unfolds with the inexorable pull of the River Styx. “Damocles” opens in a slow churn of Fender Rhodes, an ominous brew thickening bar by bar until the band snaps into a dark Elvin Jones-style mambo, riding a menacing Phrygian mode that feels both ancient and unnervingly current. “Spirits Unseen” keeps the Coltranian current flowing, a spiritually charged jazz waltz that toys with polymodality, the horns spiralling through shifting tonal centres like souls trying on different bodies. The mood softens without dissolving on “Persephone”, where the band leans into hushed, contemplative sonorities that suggest the fragile balance between captivity and rebirth. Side A closes with “As the River Flows”, a sinuous, bossa-tinged drift whose gentle surface hides darker undercurrents, a reminder that even the calmest waters can lead to the dead.
Flip the record and the afterlife opens wider. “Elysian Fields” bathes the ensemble in otherworldly harmonies, a vision of paradise that feels earned rather than easy, the horns and Rhodes hovering in a kind of suspended, luminous dusk. “Asphodel Meadows” shifts the ground with 12/8 polyrhythms, threading percussion-heavy Afro grooves around the core pulse, before “Gates of the Sun” breaks into highlife jazz, lifting the mood with bright, percussive cross-rhythms that suggest a dance at the edge between worlds. The journey ends with “Broken Dreams”, a horn-drenched, melancholy soul-jazz benediction that lets the blues seep in, not as defeat but as a kind of necessary reckoning - the sound of looking back over the distance travelled and recognising what cannot be carried back to the surface.
At the heart of Mystic Suite is the core Atlantis quintet: Ed Lister on trumpet and flugelhorn, Zakari Frantz on alto saxophone and percussion, Pierre Chrétien on electric piano and percussion, Chris Pond on bass and Mike Essoudry on drums. For this descent, they expand the constellation to include tenor saxophonist Petr Cancura - an alumnus of Cecil McBee’s group who relocated to Canada after a long New York sojourn - and Marielle Rivard, the versatile percussionist known for her work with The Souljazz Orchestra. The result is an ensemble sound that feels both denser and more porous: horns braiding in thick, incantatory lines; percussion flickering around the kit like sparks; Rhodes and bass anchoring the harmonic undertow while still leaving room for surprise.
As on previous releases, the recording process is integral to the album’s character. Engineer and co-producer Jason Jaknunas captures the music live off the floor at Metropolitan Studios, preserving the unfiltered chemistry of musicians sharing a room, eye contact and breath. The final masters are run to his cherished 1965 Studer Revox G36 all-tube 2-track tape machine, wrapping the performances in a warm, slightly haunted glow that suits the material’s underworld setting. Visually, the record reaches back in time as well: the cover art draws from a late 19th-century watercolour sketch by Norwegian artist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, an image of exploration and extremity repurposed as a portal into Atlantis’s own subterranean voyage.
