Get The Blessing - Bristol Fashion

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Get The Blessing made a big impact last year with its debut album and returns this month with another helping of genre-melting jazz rock, this time titled Bugs In Amber.

made a big impact last year with its debut album and returns this month with another helping of genre-melting jazz rock, this time titled Bugs In Amber. Clive Deamer and Jim Barr might be better known for their work with Robert Plant and Portishead but, as the jazz world discovered with its debut, the pair, joined by jazzers Jake McMurchie and Pete Judge, are deadly serious about producing an identifiable group sound, grounded in their love of Ornette Coleman, the improvising ethic and an openness to other music picked up from the ecumenical attitude of their native Bristol’s music scene. Andy Robson was our man on the spot when the album was recorded

It’s been a crazy year or so for The Blessing. Well, they’re not The Blessing any more, for a start. As long as they were an anonymous bunch of upstarts from the wild west (not that they were ever really that), no one minded that they shared a name with a hairy rock band. But now they’re the august winners of last year’s BBC Jazz Album Of The Year award, they’ve found themselves re-branded as Get The Blessing.

They may have lost part of the ‘jazz’ heritage in the process – they took their original moniker from the Ornette Coleman song – but the band remain jovially surprised at the success of All Is Yes. Even Clive Deamer who has been through the industry prize wringer not once but twice as a Mercury winner with Portishead and Roni Size can’t suppress a chortle at how events have played out. But then Get The Blessing are a band who chortle plenty.

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #130 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a limited edition jazz photograph... Lighthouse Trio Play Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall This Weekend

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