Jazz breaking news: Get The Blessing Are Back With Storming Eight Tracker With Robert Wyatt Guesting

Newly signed to Salisbury-based label Naim jazz – also now home to trioVD – the new album is comprised of eight numbers: title track ‘OC DC’ which kicks the album off with a skippy drum rhythm from Clive Deamer, followed by deep down and broody Harmon muted trumpet set against low sax tones on ‘Americano Meccano’; then ‘Torque’; ‘Adagio in Wot Minor’; ‘Between Fear and Sex’; ‘The Waiting’; ‘Low Earth Orbit’; and ‘Pentopia’.

Second track ‘Americano Meccano’ draws to mind the world of 1970s Brit crime flicks. This connection to the likes of Get Carter goes back to the early days of Portishead, which Get The Blessing owes a direct lineage to as the seminal trip hop band played to live screenings of the film in their early days. Jim Barr chugs along impressively on ‘Americano Meccano’ and the singing unison with the trumpet and sax wordless chorus has an agreeably contrarily anthemic feel to it. The baritone sax-sounding line that kicks in later in the track brings to mind the late great Ronnie Ross who appears on seminal Lou Reed track ‘Walk On The Wild Side’.

The Get The Blessing sound is remarkable for its “behind the beat” jazz feel and the recessed rhythms of Barr, the guiding light with Deamer of Get The Blessing which originally debuted as The Blessing naming itself after the Ornette Coleman song from Something Else!!!! but which had to change its name deciding to do so around the time of winning a BBC Jazz Award for All Is Yes. That album was a bolt from the blue at the time and helped revitalise the then temporarily stagnant UK jazz scene. Since then the whole notion of Brit Jazz has gathered pace as a movement, started by the by now annual August festival in Ronnie Scott’s and a successful package tour of Germany this year that Get The Blessing took part in along with the vanguard of the Brit Jazz scene.

Track six ‘The Waiting’ has an epic feel to it and a horn arrangement that is slightly reminiscent of early Empirical but crucially electric bass. What you’re getting, which makes Get The Blessing unusual, is essentially Ornette Coleman-inspired acoustic jazz that doesn’t sound like Ornette because GTB aren’t playing harmolodically, yet it’s delivered with an electric undertow and hints at skittering trip hop and psychedelia.

Deamer, who is also appearing with Radiohead as their second "live" drummer, with Barr the other pillar of the band, really opens things up at times on tracks like ‘The Waiting’. Trumpeter Pete Judge and sax player Jake McMurchie are, if you like, the front men in the band and they play exceptionally well here but the action is in the rhythms as much as the melody and the studio production, even on a slightly murky pre-release copy, has plenty of texture and sonic interest. – Stephen Graham

Hear previews from the album when Get The Blessing play the Bell in Bath this week on Wednesday. For info go to www.walcotstreet.com. They are also on home turf in Bristol at Canteen on Thursday 15 December. For more go to www.thecanteenbristol.wordpress.com