Music / free jazz
Review: SWIG feat Charlotte Keeffe & Bob Helson, Star & Dove
After moving on from their long-time monthly residency at Cafe Kino the South West Improvisers Group aka SWIG settled briefly in The Fringe before heading south to this new home in the Star & Dove. The group is a multi-generational collective of free-playing musicians that brings together improvising veterans like reed players Tim Hill and Mark Langford and accordeonist Richard Hughes with newer arrival trombonist Raph Clarkson. In-betweeners Yvonne Magda (violin), Kay Grant (vocals) and Luigi Marino (percussion) are equally solidly grounded in spontaneous music-making. It adds up to a highly creative foundation to welcome the evening’s guests Charlotte Keeffe and Bob Helson, the former a big name trumpeter around the UK contemporary jazz scene, the latter a near-legendary Bristol drummer renowned for free playing since the 70s.
SWIG: Mark Langford, Bob Helson, Richard Hughes, Luigi Marino (pic: Tony Benjamin)
It’s a nicely-sized room for an acoustic session, giving the nine performers the space to gather in a rough circle around Mark Langford’s visually commanding bass clarinet. They started with a note that became a chord, almost like an orchestra tuning up, before droning like a didgeridoo with rumbling undercurrents. The two percussionists began an exchange between Bob’s restless drum kit and Luigi’s zarb hand drum that seemed to energise things. Soon there was a pulsing hubbub, the trumpet soaring through, and a Middle Eastern rhythm emerged that led to a thoughtful duet between trombone and alto sax with vocal interjections. Things got loud then fell back to very quiet, allowing Yvonna’s violin to usher in lyrical flugelhorn and haunted vocals eventually led astray by a New Orleans inspired trombone that gained a pulsing bass drum and two-step beat. Suddenly it was carnival time, for a while at least, until it broke up into a spacious staccato spell, each musician tossing metaphorical stones into a dark pool before the drummer used crashing cymbals to chuck in a boulder and sweep everything into silence.
SWIG: Charlotte Keeffe, Raph Clarkson, Tim Hill, Kay Grant, Mark Langford (pic: Tony Benjamin)
That was the first of two sets and it typified how these improvisations should work. The musicians were always seeking both to fit in with the collective and to disrupt it, to respond to what others played but also to redirect the flow . It takes seasoned judgement to do that without just being noisy or dull and the result was a bit like a tide coming in to a full-on nine-headed peak of hubbub and then withdrawing to a different place before coming again with something new. There were some nods to the free music tradition of misusing your instrument – the trumpeter duck calling through her mouthpiece, the drummer’s foot up on a tom-tom, the clacking of saxophone keys – but the elements of anarchy were only sparingly used for maximum effect. Similarly, moments of surprising lyricism surfaced from apparent chaos as when a fulsome gospel duet crystallised between trombone and alto sax and the others hushed around it respectfully.
is needed now More than ever
SWIG: Kay Grant, Mark Langford, Bob Helson, Richard Hughes (pic: Tony Benjamin)
It’s been sixty years since Ornette Coleman first coined the term ‘free jazz’ and in that time free music has evolved, notably through the use of recording and digital sound processes, and yet also retained an almost trad consistency. If you liked it then you’d like it now – it’s all about the flow and the sense of ideas emerging and processing in real time before your very ears. A niche thing, maybe, but one that still has its devotees and they should get on down to the Star & Dove on the first Monday of the month when SWIG will start making it up all over again.
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