Style: big band jazz, progressive metal, jazz fusion, djent (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Snarky Puppy, Meshuggah, Thank You Scientist, Animals as Leaders
Country: New Zealand
Release date: 24 March 2025
Prog is a kleptomaniac genre. It borrows from a range of influences from across the sonic firmament and prog fans will have heard a variety of weird and wonderful infusions into their rock and metal, from rap to klezmer to samba. But the two big genres that are most indelibly influential to progressive music are classical and jazz. Think Renaissance, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Wilderun; Imperial Triumphant, Thank You Scientist, Cynic. We usually know what to expect from bands that infuse classical and jazz influences into their style, but our expectations here at The Subway were rather blown away in 2023 by Haralabos Stafylakis’ Calibrating Friction. Stayflakis, a guitarist and classical composer, produced an album with a small orchestra plus drummer and guitars to create compositions grounded in the compositional trappings of classical music but utilising progressive metal tropes and textures; rather than making prog metal with a bit of orchestral influence, it was an orchestra with a bit of prog metal influence. Countless bands have tackled jazz fusion prog, but can anyone turn our jazz metal expectations on their head?
Enter Chris Beernink, a bassist, guitarist, composer and audio engineer who has made the distinctly unprofitable decision to release a big band jazz metal album1. In practice, this means guitars, bass and drums working on the rhythmic metal textures, with twelve sax and horn players providing the big band. The resulting concoction is less Ornette Coleman, more djent Snarky Puppy. Fans of the late Sound Struggle, as well as djent mainstays like Meshuggah or Animals as Leaders will find familiar metal flavours to enjoy, while fans of jazz instruments in prog will suffocate on an abundance of riches.
Apocalyptic horns and gnarled metal rhythms make up the lion’s share of The Chimera Suite, so the moments playing against this tendency stand out. “II. Aergia” feels like something out of an Imperial Triumphant record, opening with eerie piano chords, restrained drumming, judicious guitar notes and some spooky horn work while slowly building inexorably towards a thundering, doomy heaviness. “I. Regenesis” takes a break for a noodling jazz guitar solo with quieter instrumentation behind. Though Beernink gives the requisite time for light and heavy to play out against one another, what’s lacking is respite from a generalised blunt force. “II. Aergia” is a softer track but it’s still somewhat dirging in its rhythms. The smoothness of that noodly guitar solo on “I. Regenesis” is the rarity, conveying a sense of delicacy much needed to balance out the heaviness. For most of its runtime, The Chimera Suite sounds like an angry swarm of bees in the best possible way, but it does threaten to wear the listener down.
The heavier metal ventures such as the doomy outro on “II. Aergia” are often the least interesting sonic elements, struggling to carve out their own identity when jettisoning the jazz. Beernink does like to throw in a thudding dirge riff every now and then—sometimes to better effect (e.g. as a rhythm for the horns and piano to work around as on “III. Event Horizon”) and sometimes just as heaviness for heaviness’s sake (“II. Aergia”). His bass and guitar playing is rooted firmly in the djent scene; anyone expecting the virtuosity of jazz fusion artists like Jaco Pastorius or Thundercat will be disappointed.
Opening track “I. Regenesis” feels almost like a jazz horn composition sitting on a metal rhythm section which was worked out after the fact, the two elements working complementarily whilst also threatening to tear one another apart. This contrapuntal polyrhythmic wonkery stays throughout, like a horny, over-saxed Meshuggah. “III. Event Horizon” opens with the madcap energy of the soundtrack from a chase scene in a 50s noir but, y’know, metal and chaotic, and it keeps that energy up for most of its nine-minute runtime, the horns reeling in their death throes at the song’s close.
In the middle of “V. Kleos”, the song goes quieter, allowing the horns to cavort and caper while Beernink’s bass chunters in the background. This builds to perhaps the most Snarky Puppy-esque section on The Chimera Suite as the horns rhapsodise in the space left by the main band exacting restraint. As the track reaches its finale, the saxes engage in a call and response refrain which becomes a rhythmic motif for the big band to bellow over before everything turns dissonant and Beernink starts hitting some low notes so heavy that one has to assume everyone in the studio had to change their underwear after recording.
However, as the track most connected to traditional jazz fusion, “IV. Fury Spawn” feels like the clear stand out of the record. The horns and woodwinds are less inclined to blast as hard as possible, the metal is less in-your-face—at least until the monstrous djent outro which suddenly explodes Car Bomb style. With the trumpet solo, the light piano work in the middle, and the far more deft drumwork, it could sit quite comfortably on a Snarky Puppy record up until that closing minute, and the lighter touch throughout the rest of the track works in favour of the crushingly heavy outro. Maybe I just prefer my jazz fusion lighter.
Beernink can join Stafylakis as a composer pushing metal into brave new realms, his fusion of jazz and metal being rather unique for a blend that’s already been attempted a thousand times before. The Chimera Suite’s big band dreams are mostly fulfilling, and though it can fall a little into djenting chasms, these tend to be exceptions on a record that proves thrilling throughout. So come on down to the modern metal jazz club: smoking’s banned, there are no tables, and they serve pints in a plastic cup. It’s better than it sounds, I promise.
Recommended tracks: I. Regenesis, IV. Fury Spawn, V. Kleos
You may also like: Haralabos Stafylakis, Sound Struggle, Seven Impale, The Resonance Project, Sarmat
Final verdict: 7.5/10
- The Chimera Suite was created with funding from Creative New Zealand. A world in which douche-weasels like Elon Musk can gut government funding initiatives is one where we get fewer creative swings like this. ↩︎
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Label: Independent
Chris Beernink is:
– Shaun Anderson (drums)
– Chris Beernink (bass, guitars)
– Dan Hayles (piano, organ, synth)
– Jake Baxendale, Tyaan Singh (alto saxophones)
– Louisa Williamson, Blair Latham (tenor saxophones)
– Frank Talbot (baritone saxophone, contrabass saxophone)
– Jack Harré, Ben Hunt, James Guildford-Smith (trumpets)
– Kaito Walley, Matt Allison, Julian Kirgan-Baez, Patrick Di Somma (trombones)
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