Hexagon Theatre, MAC, Birmingham, England
30-09-2011
Collectives are viable ways of jazz musicians in our cities to pool resources, share personnel, market their music and promote it with gigs. This three-parter brought collectives from Manchester, Birmingham and London into the same room.
First up was the 265 Quartet from the Efpi Collective in Manchester. Comprising trumpet, electric guitar, cello and clarinet, they started slow and quiet and kind of continued that way. This was an interesting amalgamation of chamber jazz and contemporary music sounds and style. While the initial Bill Frisell cover sounded a little tentative (could have been nerves in this very intimate and hushed environment) and not sufficiently sure footed rhythmically, the band warmed up to their own original material. There was some really effective rising discord cries from the two blowers and their best piece was called An Individual Note (I think).
Lluis Mather’s Noose, from Birmingham’s Cobweb Collective, was another novel quartet line-up: tenor, voice, piano and drums. It started with a poem from Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel The Island, Dan Nichols on single finger piano line shadowing Holly Thomas singing the words to a tricky tune that had all the Mather hallmarks: unusual intervals and complex phrasing but clearly from an already developed personal voice.
Mather used the voice-instrument twinning in all kinds of lovely ways – sometimes Holly was another horn with wordless harmony line to LLuis; and on Philip Larkin’s High Windows, she sang the poem as he phrased it identically on the saxophone.
Drummer Euan Palmer and Nicholls bounced off each other nicely and overall I found this the most satisfying part of the early evening. Poetry and jazz can sometimes combine a little pretentiously; but when it works – as it did with Kerouac, and as it does here – it really works!
Splice, from London’s Loop Collective were clearly the musicians a little farther down that professional road. And how could 45 minutes spent in the same room as Dave Smith and a drumkit not be interesting. Here was a band with four musicians, two of whom were engaged in real-time sound processing.
If there were longueurs they probably come with the territory when making sounds and then manipulating them is involved. There were some exciting bits but I found my mind wandering too much of the time. Perhaps I was being too distracted by the knob-twiddling.
Actually, the combining of conventional jazz instruments and loads of things with knobs on and plugs to connect, plus laptops, is the defining theme of Harmonic in 2011. Arve Henriksen and Dreams Of Tall Buildings were likely to be the pinnacle, maybe of the whole festival, but at least of this excellent first day.
