Here we go again…. with just a few quick shout-outs for potential purchases this coming Bandcamp Revenue-Free Friday (6th), assuming we can tear ourselves away from whatever rancorous madness will no doubt be unfolding across the U.S.A. by that point. (In the unlikely event you’re reading this and have an uncast vote, I’ll assume you know what you need to do with it.)

Anyway, on with what, for the foreseeable, we must laughably call ‘the show’... a rare “no electric guitars at all” edition this time around, curiously.

 

Sam Barton.

London-based brass & electronics manipulator Sam Barton is probably best-known as one quarter of the group Teeth of the Sea, but enough ‘about the author’ shit, have you HEARD the track ‘Sleuth’, which forms part of his digital only solo album ‘Acid Apple Satin Walls’, uploaded to bandcamp back in September? It’s incredible.

Multiple layers of glimmering, sci-fi synth drift slip Earth’s gravitational pull within seconds, as a crushingly mournful trumpet rings out loud and clear from the heart of some cavernous, off-world reverb tank, before a more circumspect Casio koto preset jazz lament takes over, adding just the right tug of steely-eyed nostalgia to our unfolding journey across a pulsing, Mobius/Jodorowsky cityscape of sound.

If that boring-ass ‘Bladerunner’ sequel from a couple of years back had actually succeeded in recapturing some scintilla of the original film’s visionary quality, this is the music I’d imagine we might have heard blazing across the opening credits - that’s all I’m sayin’ on the subject. It’s a shame Barton calls it a day after only six minutes (I could easily have gone for to sixty), but - leave ‘em wanting more, right?

A first trawl through the full album reveals many more exciting, bedroom-bound interstellar excursions, and it’s definitely top of my ‘buy list’ for this Friday, but for now, it’s this one track that’s hit me above all else.

 

Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brothahood.

A far cry from the melancholic tone of Angel Bat Dawid’s Transition East single from earlier this year, this double LP live set, recorded for the most part with her instrument-swapping six piece band during an appearance at 2019’s Berlin Jazzfest, is pure fire.

As is extensively detailed in the sleeve notes accompanying International Anthem’s digital release (vinyl scheduled for early next year), it seems Dawid and her companions had a pretty rough time of it on the days surrounding their performance in Berlin, and as a result, a hefty weight of simmering anger and frustration found itself channelled into a spell-bindingly anarchic and uncompromising performance, guaranteed to deliver an immediate kick to the nuts of anyone who’s written off this ‘new jazz’ scene as mere lifestyle music for hipper-than-thou home-workers, or some such (hi there).

An exuberant and outspoken stage performer to put it mildly, Dawid here leads her band through an increasingly intense series of rhythmic vocal mantras and cathartic call and response routines, sometimes veering closer to some kind of unhinged improvised theatre, revival church testimonial or group therapy session than to many listeners’ preconceptions of a quote-unquote ‘jazz’ set.

To some extent recalling the more militant and unglued corners of Art Ensemble of Chicago’s discography, one imagines this must have put the wind up some segments of the refined European festival crowd presumably assembled for this show, but, any walk-outs or deserters from the concert space may well have been forced to ask themselves - if you don't want to listen to an African-American woman speaking her mind, what the hell are you doing at a jazz festival?

Contemplation of that question, to my mind, provides an immediate validation of Dawid’s confrontational - genuinely rather “‘punk’” in fact - performance style, and needless to say, those jazzbos who did stay on for the duration will have found themselves richly rewarded, in pure muso terms just as much as on the more visceral/emotional/existential side of things.

As unconventional as their approach may have been here, Dawid and her band are certainly no slouches on the technical front. The extended interplay between Dawid’s clarinet and Xristian Espinoza’s sax on the loping grooves of ‘London’, and her keyboard improvisations on ‘Black Family’, are absolutely inspired, whilst the smouldering, nocturnal heft of the piano/horn intro to ‘We are Starzz’ is little short of sublime. Enhanced by wild, rhythmic glossolalia and cosmic synth swirls, ‘We Hereby Declare The African Look’ and ‘Melo Deez from Heab’N’ meanwhile present bizarre, sci-fi groove-outs worthy of either Funkadelic’s most errant, acid soaked excursions or Sun Ra’s most wonkily accessible ‘80s pop crossover work (depending on which way you look at it), whilst the rolling rhythmic backbone provided by South African drummer (and bandleader) Asher Gamedze and lodestone bassist Dr Adam Zanolini is exceptional throughout.

An extraordinary record which will never, ever be played in background anywhere on earth without stepping up and causing trouble, this music catches the mood of a very particular moment in space and time, and burns through it like so much blazing paraffin - a worthy successor to the most furious and misunderstood of ‘70s jazz sides.

 

Matthew Halsall.

And, on completely the other side of the contemporary jazz coin meanwhile, I’ve recently been getting into the work of Manchester-based saxophonist and band leader Matthew Halsall, and, on the basis of the two lengthy tracks available for streaming, his forthcoming double LP ‘Salute to the Sun’ is really going to be a splendid listen.

Basically a warm and toasty tribute to the all-doors-open majesty of late ‘60s spiritual jazz in the Sanders / Alice C. mould (or, perhaps, that precise moment when it hit the more austere European / ECM aesthetic?), there’s a bit of a ‘new age’y’ feel going on here perhaps which may not perhaps be everyone’s cup o’ tea (you know, a meditational, ‘mindfulness’ workshop, translucent Japanese wall hangings kind of vibe). But, as in the work of the mighty, aforementioned Ms Coltrane, this aesthetic seems to find itself verging here into a rich density of sound which remains thoroughly psychedelic, in the best possible way; climbing the damn mountains pictured on the front, not just looking at a picture of ‘em.

Straight in on the opening ‘Joyful Spirits of the Universe’ (yep), a brush across the harp strings (Maddie Herbert), a slowly unwinding melody picked out on flute (Matt Cliffe) and a big, lolloping Cecil McBee bass line (Gavin Barras) let us know exactly where we stand. And, whatever you care to say about the legitimacy of painstakingly recreating the atmos of a musical form which first peaked half a century ago, it’s a place I’m happy to continue standing in for a long, long time to come.

 

Greg Ashley & The Western Playboys.

Neither new, nor of much relevance to the lived experience of most listeners I daresay, this little EP of covers and country standards, knocked out by Greg Ashley and his backing band as a warm up for and/or cool down from laying down some of Ashley’s cynical and misery-wracked original material at some point in the past decade or so, has been pleasing me a great deal recently.

It’s all much as you’d expect really - acoustic pickin’, barrelhouse piano, hangdog rhythm and slurred, Chilton-esque vocal sneer, along with the realisation that Warren Zevon’s strung out cowboy lament ‘Carmelita’ is indeed the absolute perfect song for Ashley to have a bash at - but what can I tell you? I just really like this kind of thing when banged out with just the right quantities of guts, grit and off-hand good cheer, sounding rather like Gram Parsons’ International Submarine Band emerging from about forty years’ worth of bad road, having left their pedal steel player dead in a ditch after a botched coke deal.

Plus it looks as if I’m the only person who has actually bought this on bandcamp thus far, so you’ve gotta love an underdog, right? Yee and indeed fucking Ha.

Labels: Angel Bat Dawid, Greg Ashley, Matthew Halsall, Sam Barton