Review of Totnes Gig May 2004
From "Quarter Notes" - the Totnes Jazz Collective's Newsletter
Bird Architects - The Severn Stars Hotel, Totnes - 08 May 2004
I liked the poster. Them then and now. Young in the days of the mad Thatcher, having hair and the hair triggers of youth. I remembered their names from the Bristol Improvisers, when Bristol was a beacon for experimental and free jazz. The bands were loud and strong firing off rounds of notes like angry bandits or very sane assassins given the targets of the day. Letting freedom ring. And now, twenty years later, from spread out lives and years, they form again, eroded by the glacier of time, but is it only on the surface? Thatcher lives on in Blair. Does another Surtsey Island wait to emerge from beneath the waves, when tide and time are right. Would it be tonight?
A jazz jigsaw. The TJC put out the pieces. The band, the old Totnes ballroom where people have gathered for generations, from Victorian music hall featuring exotic Ethiopian dancers to wartime knees-ups beneath speckled lights, a just big enough stage, some seats and a bar, an audience, and it just may happen.
That’s why we go, to find out, is it here tonight? The Sound of Surprise, as one jazz critic once described it. Are we going to be taken Dorothy like for a wild ride on a weird Kansas wind? Or will all be sweet, neat and reet, a walk through friendly streets with some well-known friends? Okay though that may be, do we not travel to expand our senses? Or only to confirm what it says on the ticket? Jazz should be able to caress and console but should it not also have a clenched fist?
So the Architects came with their blueprint and built for us, a sonic edifice of some proportions. A quartet of bass, drums, violin and alto sax doubling guitar and from the first piece it was obvious that the wind was blowing. Tunes without moons and Junes were spat out from the saxophone, with an edge that stuck in the air, originals by the band, Coleman like self-balancing melodies that twist and turn away from the obvious. It might be twenty years but they still cut the mustard. High string pylons of notes held by the violin became Zappa-tight riffs that mutated somewhere sideways of bebop and were then trodden underfoot by the bass and the tectonic plate shifting drums. Solos were bitten off the collective structures, then chewed up by sax and violin, to be lifted up and dissected anew into angular splinters to be reassembled later.
This band is well rehearsed and it shows. The saxophone changes into guitar and plays an icy line of melody using a scale from somewhere east of Suez. A muezzin call from the violin heralds a new tune, another place to start a journey from, where are they going to take us now? Bourbon Street, Beirut, Berlin? I cannot predict, surprise, they do.
Artie Shaw once said that jazz was born in a whisky barrel, grew up on reefers and died on heroin. Not true, a lot of it then became a consumer product of the nostalgia industry.
Thankfully there are musicians around who want to sing their own songs and tell us of the world as they see it now. The Architects could have rebuilt a Kansas City bar, but chose to take us up the yellow brick road instead. Those of us there, certainly enjoyed the trip.
Mick Green.
