Jazz breaking news: Into orbit for Rocket Science at first UK show

The band, which brings together Evan Parker, Craig Taborn, Peter Evans of Mostly Other People Do The Killing and electronics/laptop musician Sam Pluta, played the Vortex on Friday as part of a double bill with highly rated avant garde guitarist Mary Halvorson who was completing her second night at the Dalston club.

A curious snapshot of complementary improvisers coming together – think aspects of Parker’s larger Electro Acoustic Ensemble, Dave Douglas’s Witness band (with Pluta in the role of Ikue Mori), and tiny touches of Eno-like experimentation here and there – Rocket Science is a band that relies on improv-ready collective improvisation.

With Taborn and Parker in extended episodes in unison at times organically generating long, loping runs of dazzling minimalist patterns delivered at break neck speed, Rocket Science gallop along, alternating between the slower gasps and splutters of breath and out-of-nowhere explosions of air, but fixing Evans squarely in the centre like a particularly sage-like bumble bee busily soaking up the post-modern twists and turns.

Taborn, last in the Vortex with Gerald Cleaver and Lotte Anker just over a month ago – see bit.ly/HPhMzp – shows considerable sleight of hand and rewards great study as his technique is so unusually revealing. He’s a great builder of intensity without recourse to huge surges in volume and indeed Rocket Science does not rely on big assaults of sonic power. Like Parker he can sculpt slabs of chords, a vertical improviser essentially yet one who does things at massive speed without the necessarily brutal cathartic technique of some players who might be identified with him. His approach has more in common with someone like Jason Moran, rather than Matthew Shipp say, and it would be fascinating to hear Taborn play Monk or more to the point Art Tatum. Quietly recall Evan Parker in duo with Monk-interpreter par excellence Stan Tracey and imagine Evan and Taborn in a special duo of that sort; if you do, some aspects of their fascinating rapport can be arrived at. But Rocket Science clearly works, and has a distinctive edge that drew great applause in the sold-out club on a hot night – a fine debut.

– Stephen Graham