Each track reveals a different facet of a band that thrives on surprise.
Earshift Music
Reuben Lewis |Trumpet, Synths, Pedals; Emily Bennett | Voice, Synths, Lyrics, Vocal Composition; Adam Halliwell | Bass Guitar, Guitar, Double Neck Guitar, 12-String Guitar, Flute; Ronny Ferella | Drums, percussion; Featuring: Tariro Mavondo | Poetry, Voice (Track 1); Michelle Nicolle | Voice (Track 9)
Don’t let the tongue-in-cheek title fool you. Potentially Interesting Jazz Music, the third studio album from Australian experimental collective I Hold the Lion’s Paw (IHTLP), is more than just interesting—it’s electrifying, slippery, and it’s a lot of fun to try and pin down. Led by ARIA-nominated trumpeter and sonic alchemist Reuben Lewis, the band has once again found new ways to stretch the boundaries of what we might dare to call “jazz.”
Since forming in 2016, IHTLP has embraced a radical, genre-fluid approach that’s less about fitting into jazz tradition and more about following their own creative logic. Their music can be strange, surprising, and even a little silly—but never careless. Underneath the unexpected textures and sharp turns is a deep musicality and a commitment to exploration. As The Sydney Morning Herald once put it, listening to them feels like “stumbling into someone else’s LSD trip”—but it’s a carefully composed trip, full of tension, humor, and curiosity.
Reuben Lewis, who treats the trumpet as a launchpad for live processing and sound design, isn’t interested in satisfying expectations—or in staying in any particular lane. “I want the audience to join us in a genre rebellion,” he says. But it’s less a rebellion against jazz than a leap toward open-ended possibility. Potentially Interesting Jazz Music doesn’t try to answer the question, “What is jazz?” so much as ask a better one: “What might it be?”
You can hear echoes of Don Cherry’s worldly openness, Miles Davis’s electric period, and Laurie Anderson’s theatricality—but none of those names quite capture what IHTLP is up to here. On tracks like ‘Mechanical Ghosts,’ Lewis’s trumpet, processed through pedals to extend and bend tones, sounds dreamy—flickering through layers of synth and static like a voice from a fading signal. Adam Halliwell on bass and Ronny Ferella on drums, both electronically filtered, create a dub-infused undercurrent that envelops the whole album. On ‘When the Earth and Sky Conspired,’ Michelle Nicolle’s voice is Abbey Lincoln-like in its clarity and conviction, echoing the spirit of her collaboration with Max Roach on We Insist! Freedom Now Suite—where they told the world how to behave themselves. Nicolle sings first, alone, her voice unprocessed and emotionally grounded, before the heavily filtered choir enters, lifting the vocal arrangements of Emily Bennett into something gloriously celestial.
This time around, the group set aside their usual long-form epics in favor of something more compact. The raw material came from a seven-hour improvisational marathon, later sliced, spliced, and sculpted in the studio. That post-production process—a careful balance of collage and composition—gives the album its shape. Beneath the wild surface, there’s a quiet attentiveness to form, texture, and contrast.
You could call this avant-garde, but that doesn’t quite fit. There’s groove here. There’s beauty. And there’s a sense of humor running through it all—just listen to the warped vocal loop in ‘Big Bois’ if you need proof. What you won’t find is a band trying to sound like anyone else. IHTLP just sounds like IHTLP.
If earlier albums felt like long-form meditations, Potentially Interesting Jazz Music offers a more compact, fine-tuned version of IHTLP’s sound. Each track reveals a different facet of a band that thrives on surprise. And that may be the most interesting thing about them: you never quite know what’s coming next, but you always want to hear it.
