Jazz breaking news: David Brent and Monty Python get WorldService Project spinning at the Vortex
Friday, August 9, 2013
‘Prog’, when attached to a musical style, usually suggests something complex, meandering and a bit left field.
WorldService Project would probably describe themselves as more punk than prog, but their fondness for concepts, satire, artful combinations of electronic and acoustic sounds, not to mention their surreal album art, puts them squarely in the prog camp.
There’s nothing casual about their schedule, either. The band has been busier than one of leader/keyboardist Dave Morecroft’s melody lines this year, with an album launch, and a whole series of Match&Fuse events. On Monday, the night before they left, they gave the Vortex a night of zany indulgence to celebrate their departure on an inter-continental tour of 40 consecutive performances across France and the US.
The evening opened with Raphael Clarkson playing improvised solo trombone to accompany a series of comedy clips, from Monty Python to David Mitchell. Comedy is clearly a big part of who WSP are, and their taste in humour is good. It had never occurred to me to overlay David Brent with an improvised trombone track, but then the point of going to live jazz is to hear things that had never occurred to you. It felt like an uneasy combination of Turner Prize exhibit and a Chardonnay-infused Friday night with a DVD box set, but the bold eccentricity of the concept was endearing, even though the music ended up coming second to the comedy, as Clarkson manoeuvred his trombone line to avoid obliterating the punchline.
After a main set of album covers, WSP’s next experiment was to arrange some of the album tracks as dance music. In one sense this was very effective: only the heavy Vortex tables prevented a spontaneous rave, and there was something magical about the acoustic dance sound, but in flattening the dynamics and regularising the rhythms, they neutered the jazz.
As for the album, it was reviewed positively in the August issue of Jazzwise, when Daniel Spicer celebrated the band’s confidence, humour and technical sophistication. He also questioned whether they were playing jazz, given the largely composed nature of their pieces. It’s a fair point. What they lack in musical improvisation, though, they more than make up for in their good-humoured and thoroughly experimental attitude to performance. They probably knew that an improvised trombone wouldn’t really chime with Alan Partridge, but just wanted to try it anyway, and there’s something very refreshing about that attitude.
– Matthew Wright