An imminent show at the Church of Sound in Clapton showcases British and French artists – the Greg Foat Band and the Neue Grafik Ensemble. Both play a contemporary take on ’70s soul jazz as it moved on a mystically airy arc away from earthiness and into the more fantastical zones of funk and psychedelia: in Greg’s case laced with tidal Radiophonic electronica via antique suitcase synth, and in NGE’s case celestial Rhodes keying.
More from the Church:
“Greg Foat’s latest album ‘The Mage’ threads lineage between the past and future of British jazz, enlisting the talents of jazz/library/soundtrack legends Duncan Lamont, Art Themen, Ray Russell and Clark Tracey to collaborate with their modern contemporaries, Greg Foat, Moses Boyd and Heliocentric’s drummer Malcolm Catto. Something undeniably British but outward-looking and global has been created. Greg’s compositions and arrangements showcase the old and new, downtempo folkscapes, free jazz with notes of hip-hop and soul from the young team flavouring the mix. The album is a testament to the versatility and pure musicality of all those involved and Greg Foat’s ability to bring artists together to record beautiful, timeless music.
“Personnel on the night: Greg Foat (piano, EMS Synthi AKS), Clark Tracey (drums), Eric Young (congas), Phil Achille (bass), Trevor Walker (trumpet), Rob Mach (saxophones), Hugh Harris (guitar) with special guest Duncan Lamont (tenor saxophone).
“Parisian-born producer Fred “Neue Grafik” N’Thepe formed his Ensemble last year, consisting of trumpet player Emma-Jean Thackray, Vels Trio’s drummer Dougal Taylor, bassist Matt Gedrych and of course Fred himself on keyboards. Grafik’s sound is a hybrid of jazz, house and hip hop, all with his unique geographical tones of African ethnicity, Parisian roots and a love for London sounds (like broken beat and grime) thrown into the mix. For this session, they will be joined by rapper and poet Brother Portrait who is omnipresent on NGE’s forthcoming EP.”
Representing the Church of Sound DJ resources, half of the CoS diumvirate (and Total Refreshment Centre founder) Lex Blondin will be manning the decks, and there’ll be an aftershow party over at Tottenham’s Five Mile club.
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Further north-east, the Polish Jazz London Series is opening up in Waltham Forest. It’s a handshake between a borough celebrating its current status as London Borough of Culture (and pushing hard not to be overshadowed by the existing momentum of Hackney and Tottenham), the Polish Cultural Institute, B Side Events and the Music Halls Project which is opening up church spaces in Walthamstow and Leytonstone as high-quality music performance venues.
Poland isn’t the first place that springs to mind when jazz is mentioned. Cognoscenti, however, are aware of it as an incubator of high-end music with typical Polish determination. Five monthly concerts starting in the summer and leading into the autumn – each featuring some outstanding talent – demonstrate how productive this can be.
The first, on 4th July, features Warsaw avant-fusioneers Niechęć – saxophonist Maciej Zwierzchowski, drummer Michał Kaczorek, guitarist Rafal Błaszczak, keyboard player Michał Załęski and double bassist Maciej Szczepański stir ominous misty shifts of chord-tones and atmospherics into spinning jagged cyclones. Theirs is a frictional engagement with the air, although one which embraces a tight mothership of form rather than a straight free-jazz explosion.
Szczepański’s fondness for arco bowing, Zwierzchowski’s for caustic, cryptic Shorterish sax commentary and the band’s readiness to pursue whistling psychedelic rockscapes close to that of ‘Saucerful’-era Pink Floyd (as well as touching on the tweaked, ring-modulated open-ended fierceness of early electric Miles and the initially freeforming argumentation of Weather Report) pin them as spirit brothers to the permeable explorers of the ’70s cusp. Translated from the Polish, their name means “dislike”; and sometimes their music’s a growling frown, a diet of harsh and undying embers. Despite that, it’s never withdrawn or surly, never dull – it constantly takes you along with its dark and challenging moods.
The August concert features a new trio led by pre-eminent young Polish polymath Marcin Masecki. Not new in that his keyboard playing is augmented by his regular project cohorts (Jerzy Rogiewicz on drums and Piotr Domagalski on double bass) but new in that he’s apparently not looked into the possibilities of a classic trio since his schooldays. Since then, he’s been busy mastering and promoting a dizzying variety of projects and musical applications (the program lists it all as “big bands, brass orchestras, classical symphony orchestras, choirs, alternative pop bands, electric quintets, acoustic duets, sextets and nonets, composing for film and theatre, giving masterclasses, classical chamber musicking, and a vast body of solo work”).
It took an extended moment alone to trigger this new project – a jogging session during which Marcin became fascinated by both the bodily mechanics of respiration, extension, heart-rate (and so forth) and the mental changes and separation of mind which occur during the strictures of exercise. He opted to translate this across into music. In this clip, you can see how the post-bop pulse motors away while Marcin plays a succession of complex, diversifying ideas on top of it, maintaining both independence and integration while also sustaining perfect stability and authority.
The September gig features the bony, peppery rhythmic work of the Kuba Więcek Trio, whose paradoxical music (authoratively skittish; cerebrally frenzied; making overpowering gestures within a small and disciplined space) has been noted by uber-critic and fellow countryman Piotr Metz for combining the Polish post-bop of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s with knowingly neurotic Manhattanisms. More specifically, “the melody, which seems straight from Komeda songs, also has the noise of the New York traffic.” Each member doubles, musically – bass player Michał Barański spits and mutters konnakol (Carnatic drum-talk vocals), drummer Łukasz Żyta rattles out additional melodies on glockenspiel, and Kuba himself swaps between saxophone and dropped-in synth or electronics.
Packed into the music are funk and marches, transposed tabla burrs, Birdland boptalk and strains of eastern European folk dance. The trio’s also capable of periods of delicate sweetness, but always with a febrile watchfulness and staccato undercurrent; as if they’re tiptoeing precisely over a tough streetscape of broken glass and stray syringes even as they chat or serenade.
The October gig features High Definition Quartet, who come with sky-high praise from Randy Brecker: but if, from that, you’re expecting them to fit into his American fusion tradition, you’d be surprised. While this collectively-run quartet are second-to-no-one in hoarding and firing out classic chops, they’re also continual polyreferential box-busters, moving through multiple styles . It’s not just a case of tricksy polystylism, though: not something carried out as a joke. Instead, Piotr Orzechowski (who also rejoices in the nickname of “Pianohooligan”) and his allies (double bassist Alan Wykpisz, saxophonist Mateusz Śliwa and drummer Grzegorz Pałka) come across more as people whose brains process at double-speed: simultaneously and voraciously riffing and developing from anything which flits across their attention or their synapses.
For their current project, Piotr and the quartet have created jazz rearrangements of ‘Bukoliki’, a set of short piano pieces (originally string duets) by Witold Lutosławski – which he, in turn, derived by old Polish folk songs from the distinct Kurpie forest culture of north-east Poland (whose music also inspired Górecki). A second-generation mutation, then; and one which the HDQ deliver with breathtaking speed, precision and invention, respecting the source material by stepping deeply into it and refusing to do anything less than give it and gift it every scrap of their own intuition.
The last show (as far as I know) is in November, in the grand Art Nouveau surroundings of Leyton’s Great Hall, sponsored by LVE Foundation. Signing us out is Wrocław septet Electro-Acoustic Beat Sessions, or EABS – a Polish answer to the current club-culture reinvigorations of jazz forms as demonstrated by Shabaka Hutchings, Kamasi Washington and others. Via their technological wildcard Spisek Jednego, EABS merge sampling and looping into their instrumentation in a “reconstruction from deconstruction” approach. The rest of the band consists of Marek Pędziwiatr (on piano, synths and voice), guitarist Vojto Monteur, drummer Marcin Rak, bass player Paweł Stachowiak and a doubled brass line of Jakub Kurek (trumpet) and Olaf Węgier (tenor sax); merging a profoundly lyrical sensibility and a taste for European conceptual landscapery, while pulling in and transforming strong strands of hip hop, jungle, funk, gospel and electronic music.
As with many jazz acts, EABS build into a developing future while looking deeply into a specific cultural past. Among their preoccupations are the ideas of “Slavic melancholy” and the culture’s tendency to have favoured oral transmission over literacy: something reflected in the examination of Polish demonology and general Slavic mythology in their most recent recording, ‘Slavic Spirits’, drawing on accounts from “musicians, historians, journalists, writers and even psychotherapists.”
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Dates:
Church of Sound presents:
Greg Foat Group + Neue Grafik Ensemble + Church of Sound DJ set
St James the Great, 188 Lower Clapton Road, Clapton, London, E5 8EG, England
Friday 21st Jun 2019, 7.30pm – information here and here
Polish Jazz London Series:
- Niechęć – St Mary’s Music Hall, 8 Church End, Walthamstow, London, E17 9RL, England – Thursday 4th July 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here
- Marcin Masecki’s Jazz Trio – St John’s Music Hall, High Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 1HH, England – Friday 16th August 2019, 6.30pm – information here
- Kuba Więcek Trio – St Mary’s Music Hall, 8 Church End, Walthamstow, London, E17 9RL, England – Thursday 19th September 2019, 6.30pm – information here and here
- High Definition Quartet – St John’s Music Hall, High Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 1HH, England – Friday 18th October 2018, 6.30pm – information here
- EABS – Leyton Great Hall, 1 Adelaide Road, Leyton, London, E10 5NN – Thursday 21st November 2019, 6.30pm – information here
Misfit City 