Music / Jazz
Review: Andy Sheppard & Eivind Aarset, St George’s
The world of jazz owes much to Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM records, including providing the opportunity for Andy Sheppard to bring Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset into his band. The resulting album Surrounded by Sea was a masterpiece of tone and form, with Eivind’s electronic soundscapes providing the integration between Andy’s distinctively lyrical saxophone and the quartet’s powerful rhythm section. It was interesting, therefore, to anticipate quite what a duo performance might reveal.
Eivind Aarset – guitarist?
Calling Eivind Aarset a guitarist is an over-simplification, of course, though he uses a guitar to trigger an array of electronics and effects, and the opening number saw him gradually assembling a rolling orchestral wave from loops and sustained sounds while Andy layered a chorale of soprano sax using his own pedal set-up.
Andy Sheppard
It was a kind of Baroque fanfare that was immediately followed by a more orthodox bridge of Gospel-tinged melody on tenor sax over a gently surging chord sequence that would almost imperceptibly evolve into a massive coda of weaving electronics. Rich chords pulsed in lush washes with deep submarine harmonics and occasional glimpses of a distant chorus, while throughout Andy held to his melodic course as the soundtrack dismantled unhurriedly until all that was left was the hush of breath through the saxophone. It was a perfectly sure-footed model of construction (and deconstruction) in real time.
is needed now More than ever
The concert was part of the Watershed’s Filmic collaboration and two numbers were particularly suited to the theme. The Dream Keepers of Buenos Aires established a sinister ethereal mood, harmonised saxophone over hazy guitar punctuated by a weighty bass-drum sound generated by Eivind’s thumb whacking his ‘live’ guitar body. The spacious intensity of the music hovered somewhere between Portishead and Morricone – Once Upon A Time in The South West, maybe? – and spoke of broken hearts in a harsh desert. Stretch, by comparison, had the languid feel of something Angelo Badalimenti might have put on a David Lynch soundtrack, an angular unison between guitar and sax alternating with a kind of Pink Floyd lounge-rock verse that gave Andy the space for a trademark bop-baroque circular breathing solo. Eivind’s solo also began within conventional rock harmonics but slipped off-kilter to add an air of Lynchian menace to proceedings.
The gig closed with a couple of Andy’s ‘regulars’, namely the emergence of Goodnight Irene from a meandering sax line over a gentle industrial pulse and a pretty straightforward encore rendering of Nick Drake’s Riverman for sax and guitar. It was the third consecutive Thursday at St George’s that that number had been covered and this was an unfussed model of economy and sincerity.
It had been fascinating to watch Eivind Aarset at work in a musical context so stripped down that you could pick out how he constructed and processed the sound at his disposal. Hunched over his guitar, his angled features and dangling grey hair somehow recalling that old Picasso picture, his darting hands (and dabbing feet) constantly flickered across the controls of the many devices in front of him. Given the complexity of the set-up it was amazing that only once was there an audible glitch, instantly quashed, while he otherwise maintained four or five separate sound elements and even, at times, also actually played the guitar!
Eivind’s extraordinary grasp of live electronics was clearly a perfect complement to Andy’s familiar capacity for sketching elegant and economic melodies and, as with so many of the saxophonist’s previous illustrious duo excursions, there was clearly no need for anything more. I’m not aware that they have any further duo outings planned – the full quartet is about to play at Cheltenham – but it would be a real shame if a wider world didn’t get to experience this stylish and enlightening music.
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
