Near the end of winter 2024, The Circling Sun, the Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland jazz collective, co-led by drummer and percussionist Julien Dyne and woodwind player Cameron Allen, put the finishing touches on their second album, Orbits. A year later, it floated into the world through the acclaimed British independent label, Soundway Recordings. On November 21, they’re releasing a deluxe digital version of the album featuring three new tracks.
Arranged for a vast array of woodwind, brass, keyboards, synthesisers, acoustic bass, drums, percussion, and choir vocals, Orbits is the very opposite of a sophomore slump. Through a free-flowing confluence of spiritual jazz, Brazilian bossa nova, and samba soul influences, The Circling Sun build on the 1960s-slanted sensibilities of their 2023 debut, Spirits. In the process, they offer up seven simultaneously concise and yet cosmically expansive compositions that pay homage to the highs and lows of life lived under the manifold social, political, and environmental pressures that bear down on many.
From the opening of “Constellation”, the ghosts of Pharoah Sanders and Carl Tjader intermingle with the group’s purity of intent. Note by note, they summon up a moving, globally-minded melange of sounds that sets the agenda for everything that follows. Even as the rhythm section tilts towards the dancefloor, the group’s horn ensemble soars skyward into the infinite.
In the early 2010s, fellow Tāmaki Makaurau producer and DJ Christopher Martin James, better known as Christoph El Truento, served as the in-house DJ during The Circling Sun’s residency at Ponsonby Social Club. As James recalls, they began as a covers band. However, rather than sticking to jazz standards, they opted to intermingle modal classics and devotional obscurities with vibrant records from Africa and Latin America. “They went substantially deeper than you normally would at a jazz night,” he remembers.
Over the next decade and a half, The Circling Sun cycled through lineups and locales, including The Golden Dawn tavern and East Street Hall. In the early days, members played with the New Zealand hip-hop-jazz-funk and neo-soul acts Opensouls and Ladi6. Some of them, like Dyne, have released solo material. Today, they’re also associated with Avantdale Bowling Club, Nathan Haines, and Carnivorous Plant Society, amongst other groups and solo artists. Regardless of the era, the common thread has been an inquisitive and questing spirit that shows no signs of waning.
By the time the collective recorded their debut album, Spirits (2023), they’d already put 10,000 hours in. “We did our time with all this cool music: Bobby Hutcherson, Gene Harris, Airto Moreira, Mulatu Astatke, Milton Banana, Tunde Williams,” reflects Dyne. “When it came time to record, the music we made was in correspondence with the best aspects of what we’d been covering. Rather than copying it, we made music inspired by it, to accompany it.” In the process, they developed the diverse musical vocabulary that makes Orbits feel so fluent.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Last year, I was in attendance when The Circling Sun entertained a seated audience inside Pah Homestead, a historic Italianate-style building located in Tāmaki Makaurau’s leafy Hillsborough suburb. That night, they were joined by their accompanying vocal group, The Love Affinity Choir, which brought an optimistic, many-voiced universal voice to the music. Multicultural in makeup, they presented a cosmopolitan image of what Aotearoa’s arts and culture can offer the world.
“Julien [Dyne] has a strong concept of what he’s doing,” enthuses Gianmarco Liguori, a guitarist, composer, and the founder of the cult experimental jazz label, Sarang Bang Records. “He’s surrounded by a lot of creative people, and he makes things happen.” Liguori has followed The Circling Sun’s development since they formed and sees value in the group’s community ethos and approach. “The music is accessible, ecstatic, and open enough to keep experimenting and pushing things forward into new territory,” he continues.
Credit: Supplied
Across Orbits, the balance between vibrant instrumentation, delicate electronics, and ascendant group vocals is a recurring force. It’s an inspired dynamic that really shines through on the LP’s second and third tracks, “Mizu” (Japanese for “water”) and “Seki” (Samoan slang for “awesome”). They’re both vivid compositions that never wear out their welcome. For reference, I think it’s helpful to consider Blue Note Records’ late 1970s era, and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova jazz standard “Água de Beber.” I’m also reminded of Wayne Shorter’s 1975 album Native Dancer (featuring Milton Nascimento). Having listened to “Mizu” and “Seki” perhaps a hundred times, I still find myself returning to them for the paradisical qualities they offer.
“I think there is a universal awareness, want and need from all of us to do better for mankind,” explains Dyne. “When there’s so much hate, war, injustice and horrible shit in the world, it’s more important than ever to create something beautiful that has some substance, mana, wairua and vibe imbued in it to give people the juice to keep going. Our music is about hope and love, very primal things. Even the guttural cry of a saxophone can resonate with someone.”
In the iteration of The Circling Sun that crafted Orbits, Dyne and Allen were accompanied by upright bassist Ben Turua, keyboardist Joe Kaptein, brass player and percussionist Finn Scholes, woodwind player JY Lee, and synthesiser operator, percussionist, and choir leader Matt Hunter, aka Kenny Sterling. However, that’s far from the whole cast involved. Even at a glance, the credits reveal the album was a community affair, with, aside from The Love Affinity Choir, notable New Zealand musicians like John Bell, Daniel Ryland, Cory Champion and Brandon Haru appearing as special guests. “We were so spoiled to work with all these incredible artists on Orbits,” continues Dyne. “It’s a real snapshot of an era.”
Supported by a Creative New Zealand grant, The Circling Sun were able to spend a year on Orbits while ruminating on what they felt had or hadn’t worked in the past. Ostensibly, the starting point was a set of MIDI demos Dyne wrote with Allen. From those foundations, they collectively expanded, recorded, mixed and produced the LP between three locations. Most of it was tracked at Tom Broome’s Broome Recordings studio in New Lynn, which Dyne describes as “the cusp of being super pro, but super relaxed.” When it came time to record The Love Affinity Choir, however, the basement experimental music venue Audio Foundation provided the ideal “big, open, expansive space” to capture Hunter’s vision for their vocal group, before finishing the LP at Dyne’s home studio.
While reflecting on The Circling Sun and Orbits, I spoke with Damian “DFresh” McGregor, a veteran Māori DJ and record collector from Ashhurst, near Palmerston North. In the 2010s, he contributed to a resurgence of interest in vintage soul, jazz fusion, and disco funk from Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu. McGregor has long admired Black America and the African diaspora’s 1960s/1970s spiritual and Afrocentric jazz movements and their many successors. Within the work of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Alice Coltrane and their fellow voyagers, he senses a transcendent desire for something better. “It’s the sound of the universe within, and it really takes you there,” he says.
In the past, McGregor has heard antipodean echoes of that feeling in the works of two fellow local composers: pianist Mike Nock’s vaunted ECM record, Ondas, and the saxophonist Lucien Johnson’s albums. Today, he detects something similar in The Circling Sun. “It’s about coming from a fundamental learning background, before breaking free and shattering those constraints of time and tone,” he enthuses. “It’s an expulsion of essence. I think of the energy within every human being as being the same energy the sun emits, or is found at the core of the earth. It can be both pure and furious.”
The second half of Orbits begins with The Circling Sun’s longtime bassist Ben Turua taking a well-deserved moment in the spotlight on ‘Amina’.
His offering is a beautiful four-chord sequence. Gently accompanied by shuffling percussion, group horns, guitars and keys, it ebbs and flows like water lapping against the shore. The song’s high point is the arrival of a Sun Ra slanted choral refrain penned by Semisi Ma’ia’i, the frontman of Ōtepoti psychedelic-pop band Marlin’s Dreaming: “For the darkness we don’t mind / Sharpens my old mind.”
Recently, Christoph El Truento played a DJ set at a show alongside some young music school graduates. The experience reminded him of how times have changed. “They seemed way more informed than we were at that age,” he explains. “Young musicians are listening to so much more than just straight-ahead jazz. There’s a real [record] crate digger mentality that has leaked in through The Circling Sun. I think it comes from Julien [Dyne]. He was always trying to find crazy music.” These days, Dyne isn’t just trying to find crazy music; he’s making it with his friends as well.
View this post on Instagram
As the album drifts towards its dreamy conclusion, The Circling Sun pay respect to the legendary Brazilian jazz-funk trio Azymuth in a sun-kissed, summery style on “Flying”. Afterwards, they dip into the cinematic, cool jazz mode of Canadian-American pianist, arranger, and band leader Gil Evans on “Teeth”. Finally, the collective closes the proceedings out with a groove that wouldn’t sound out of place in a classy late 1960s/early 1970s Ethiopian hotel lounge on the fittingly titled nocturnal number “Evening”.
If the quality of playing and composition across Orbits just represented a significant moment within New Zealand’s modern jazz scene, that would arguably be enough. Hearteningly, though, its impact has been far from landlocked within our island borders and distant geography. In the UK, Europe, and Asia, the album has quickly emerged as a record store and DJ favourite. It’s also won acclaim from respected broadcasters and tastemakers such as Gilles Peterson, Tina Edwards, Luke Una, and Iñaki Durán, who hear something fresh and needed in The Circling Sun’s songs.
Recently, the Soundway Records release of Orbits was given the obi-strip treatment in Japan by the Osaka-based record store and label, Wonderful Noise, a high honour for any musician really. Ultimately, the album captures a moment of open-hearted collaboration and renewal within the New Zealand jazz scene. Across both sides of the LP, two generations of musicians from Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Whanganui-a-Tara come together through joy, heartbreak, pain, and pleasure to make a truly joyful noise. What lingers afterwards isn’t just the bittersweet beauty of the music, but the empathy and understanding that comes from many minds, bodies and souls uniting in the shared pursuit of greater connection.
The Circling Sun’s Orbits is out now through Soundway Records. On November 21st, Orbits (Deluxe) will be available on digital and streaming platforms.
