Next Stop

Having collaborated as the London-based Portico Quartet for more than a decade, drummer Duncan Bellamy and saxophonist Jack Wyllie know how to maximize their time and effort. Their sessions for the 2021 album *Monument* were productive enough to have generated this compelling follow-up EP. Of the four contrasting songs, the title track is the most rhythmically intense, with long manipulated soprano sax sounds floating over Bellamy’s fast broken-beat patterns. On the opening “Captured Time,” Wyllie gets an almost trumpetlike tone from the soprano as string textures and rhythmic agitation swell around him. “Procession” begins in a piano-centered stillness, with breath elements and drones setting up a doleful, slowly pulsing elegy on tenor sax. “Youth,” also with Wyllie on tenor, has fat, sustaining synth-bass tones undergirding a reverberant and impassioned melody. Aesthetically, *Next Stop* is one with *Monument*, though it expands the scope of that previous achievement.