Hotel for the Birds By Steve Day
The Royal Seven Stars, Totnes, Devon, is at the bottom of the High Street where the road laps the water and the boats look like taxis. The seasons are changing, in May these birds have regularly started to fly back to Devon even though they started out twenty-two years ago in the city of Bristol, over a hundred miles away, further up the endless flight path of the M5 motorway.
The Bird Architects were once a band and now they are again. When I last heard the ornithological Architects play it was 1984. It was one of those gigs in a room over a bar. The yellow wall papered square box was the size of a high-heel shoe. It stank of feet, real ale and damp t-shirt armpits. We had come to hear this soaring architectural bird of young men blow the belief that ‘fusion’ was supposed to be weather reporting inside the design of a former silent way.
The Bird Architects always were coming from a different, more elegant place; more to do with Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time than Joe Zawinul’s desire to move from the pages of Downbeat magazine to Rolling Stone. I do not know another band currently inhabiting the same space as the Architects. If this music does not seem immediately obvious it is because the immediately obvious is not being played. The sounds descending out of the Hotel For The Birds is the real thing, live with no overdubs; not so pure, not so simple. If it has any aural route with past practices, Frank Zappa’s guitar experiments with violinist Sugarcane Harris might come to mind. Having said that, Uncle Zappa never had the advantage of doubling on the kind of interactive alto saxophone which guitarist Aaron Standon operates within these proceedings and the goat beard wonder certainly never collected a drummer/keyboard player like the extraordinary Marco Anderson. The Bird Architects are not rock & roll yet they could not exist without it. The internal hit coming off Mark Turner’s bass is not even vaguely related to an acoustic instrument. Instead it remains as near to the bottom of the dance floor as it is possible to get while still standing. The violin of Peter Evans seems to hide in this mix only to come soaring out as if it has suddenly escaped its own confines.
The ensemble playing contains all the rigor and complexity of jazz yet bursts through the dogma imposed by some of the J word’s disciples. Too light to be dark, too dark to be light, this is music demanding a longer residency. The opening passage to Hotel For Birds is like listening to a stark windy street prepare for thunder and lightening, both anticipatory yet beautifully self contained. What follows is a flow of music which takes the ears out of the ordinary, to a place where you do not have to wonder why, merely accept the architecture as a new landscape. Which way is South?
Steve Day (Author of Two Full Ears, Listening to Improvised Music and Ornette Coleman: Music Always, both published by Soundworld.)
