There’s a protean quality to drummer composer Sebastian Rochford‘s work.
You will know this going back a long way if you have followed his prodigious work with Polar Bear whose classic albums have been reissued recently.
He works with comics like James Acaster. Or how about, in massive contrast, his stint playing grindcore with Pete Wareham and Neil Charles in a Bethnal Green church circa Pulled By Magnets which was both loud and exhilarating.
The great thing that struck me early on listening to the rockist Finding Ways on opener ‘Maybe’ oh about the second chorus in was when David Preston went all Billy Jenkins.
If you recall guitarist Jenkins “man from Lewisham” has a unique sound that travels the spaceways from Frank Zappa to Ginger Baker to the blues and back again.
Preston is significant on these tunes. And Seb plays to him a good deal in empathetic fashion. It’s a world away from his chamber jazz intimacies found with Kit Downes recorded in the drummer’s native Scotland on A Short Diary.
Also on the upcoming album are Tara Cunningham, Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Simon Tong (The Verve, Gorillaz). Sonically there’s a name mixer on board in Tchad Blake who 20 plus years ago produced The Bad Plus classic, Give.
The great thing about Rochford and this has been the case irrespective of whether he was working with Acoustic Ladyland, Pete Doherty’s Babyshambles or Sons of Kemet in their first and greatest incarnation doubling with Tom Skinner is he keeps you guessing as a player on records that aren’t led by him just as much as records that are.
This isn’t your typical jazz album or to some at all (it’s like post-punk instrumental indie, if being picky in terms of genre as a kind of a stab at it). But I prefer to think of what’s to come out as something else entirely played mainly by jazz players.
If you know volume 2 of David Preston’s Purple / Black issued last year that Seb is also on what’s in store is a good companion listen.
The full album is out in November, opening track the appealingly bitonal ‘Maybe’ is streaming.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
Michael Arbenz meets Andy Sheppard: From Bach to Ellington – Live, No Label ****
Gruff and stately it’s great to hear Andy Sheppard on a record again. It’s been a while. And like a lot of UK jazz musicians who were stars in the 1980s and 1990s Sheppard’s profile has dipped.
This Ellington and Bach inspired themed album was recorded in Switzerland, in a small jazz club the Bird’s Eye in Basel last August and it finds Sheppard with Vein piano motivator Michael Arbenz.
Very strongly framed, the material is meaningful, sonics bright and clear – the rootedness of the improvisations consistent and serious. Arbenz has Ellington form: He delivered a solo album of great sensitivity a few years ago called Reflections of D. Here ‘African Flower,’ once again ‘Reflections in D,’ ‘Warm Valley’ and ‘Melancholia’ are the Ellington choices.
A treatment of Ellington’s ‘Melancholia’ sets the mood. But it’s not a depressing listen at all. The feeling is more that it seems a honest statement by two masters of self examination. Via very cleanly captured recording sound, listeners far away can easily imagine they are there in the room.
‘Psalm’ is inspired by Cantata BWV 146, and ‘Where It Springs Into Being,’ which is my favourite of these beautiful tracks, by ‘Prelude in C’ from The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Bach has been hugely influential on jazz musicians at least since the heyday of Jacques Loussier while Ellington’s music is, along with Monk’s, the most significant corpus of jazz composition in jazz history. Sheppard’s fellow Englishman Stan Tracey was massively inspired by Ellington; and only last year Ian Shaw and Tony Kofi immersed themselves rewardingly in Ellingtonia on another successful live club recorded album.
All in all it’s a subdued album full of yearning, tenderness and love.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
- Stacey Kent, A Time For Love, Naïve Records ***1/2
- Preview: Blair/Huber to surface at SJQ on the evening of Easter Monday down in Dalston
- John Beasley with the SWR Big Band, Invisible Piano, O-tone music ****
- Shalosh, What We Are Made Of, ACT ***
- The Bad Plus, Chris Potter, Craig Taborn, Barbican, City of London ****
