Hare & Hounds, Kings Heath, Birmingham UK
16-12-09
It’s natural when you have a real, live pop star in your band that he is going to be the main selling point and threaten to be the main focus. But, in fact, this free improv band is one of five equals, and Fyfe Hutchins/Dangerfield, of the similarly nomenclatured Guillemots, plays something of a supportive role a lot of the time.

In the excellent larger upstairs room at the Hare & Hounds, they plunged their somewhat sparse audience into an intense pair of sets. Setting up the foundations, drummer Steve Noble was a highly creative powerhouse, while Dominic Lash, on double bass, was both hugely inventive but also very solid in nailing down strong, buzzing riffs when the mood suggested.

At the front there was a double reed onslaught with Alex Ward alternating clarinet and alto, while Chris Cundy dug deep on bass clarinet. It was left to Dangerfield – or is that Hutchins? – to work in the  space between rhythm and wailing frontline, though to be fair such divisions are somewhat contrived when everyone is doing everything, bass clarinet as percussive as drums, double bass as melodic as saxophone, all churning up a fine and mighty row.

I felt Cundy was a little too dominant but as he was clearly really enjoying himself it seems mean to carp. Fyfe added some well needed humour into the somewhat serious proceedings with a dog barking sample in the first set and what sounded very like a slightly crazy laughter sample in the second, which he enthusiastically took up the keyboard in ever more manic fashion.

The pop star has more melodies in him that a thousand ordinary people, as he has shown not only in Guillemots but also in the classical and choral music he has written, so it was remarkable he could go for so long in such abstract vein – thankfully he was able to inject a groove and a riff or two as the second set became a little more spacious and dynamically interesting.

What struck me most is how much free improv there is around at the moment and also how different it sounds when the players come – as I assume these ones do – from backgrounds and musical traditions that are not so purely jazz ones. The kind of technique that Cundy exhibits, for example, would seem more grounded in contemporary “classical” music, and that gives a different, though no less interesting, character to his free improv.

If I had to pick one player out of what is very much a democratic band with no clear soloists, it would be Noble. At one point Dangerfield set up a ferocious hook and Noble took the challenge at a remarkable pace, prompting a grin from the keyboardist. He wouldn’t have seen them in the dark but I guarantee the audience were grinning too.