Jazz breaking news: Neneh Cherry surfaces with free jazz heroes The Thing
Thursday, April 19, 2012
“If I could only be/like I’ve always wanted,” the beginning of ‘Cashback’ on The Cherry Thing is not so much an I-could-have-been-a-contender sort of line but a hint of a reawakening, which the unlikely collaboration between Neneh Cherry and The Thing turns out to be.
Recorded in London around the time of The Thing’s storming short residency at the Vortex in November 2010, the angry ‘Cashback’ has a punk intensity you don’t hear any more. With the deep, aggressive double bass of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten opening up the album with a sound that makes some bassists sound positively puny by comparison, it’s a platform for Cherry, absent from the high profile music scene of late, although in January she guested at a jazz benefit for the under threat Doncaster Youth Jazz Association at Ronnie Scott’s, singing ‘Think Twice’ with Groove Armada. That night she came on late and put in a strong performance, before later strolling casually outside, to chat in Swedish to a pal on the pavement outside the club while having a smoke as Soho began to buzz in the midnight hour. 
Swedish/Norwegian band The Thing have a fearsome reputation, and are one of the most stimulating free jazz and improv jazz bands around, with a capacity for turning even the most ardently hostile into fervant admirers. They join the dots between often diametrically opposed musics, with the energy of the best rock bands you’ll ever see but with jazz chops to burn.
Here they are pretty restrained by their own standards, although Mats Gustafsson opens up periodically with his straining orgasmic lines towards the end of ‘Cashback’ and in a great run on his own tune ‘Sudden Moment’, a sign that this is no sell out album. Paal Nilssen-Love at the kit, think Rashied Ali-meets-Keith Moon, as usual takes no prisoners. With The Thing Cherry uses Gustafsson’s baritone sax work particularly as a sturdy crutch in the opening tracks especially when she gets on to Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’ the stand out of the album. Allegedly the first band ever to use the word ‘punk’, Suicide’s cult appeal will help this album along although most old jazzers will be indulgently mystified by their appeal. The interpretation is a breath of fresh air, woozy, liable to inspire at a guess a fair amount of ragged dancing in certain clubs, injecting the momentum of free jazz into a throw away art-punk anthem.
Cherry’s laidback but at times emotive vocals make the material convincing and even hard hitting. Martina Topley-Bird’s ‘Too Tough To Die’, ‘Sudden Moment’, another stand out, hip hopper MF Doom’s ‘Accordion’, Don Cherry’s ‘Golden Heart’, a sprawling epic, The Stooges’ appealingly stodgy ‘Dirt’, and Ornette’s ‘What Reason’ make this a fascinating collision of punk, free jazz and in the case of Topley-Bird a sideways nod to the Bristol of Tricky and Massive Attack which Cherry was a part of back in the day.
– Stephen Graham
The Cherry Thing is released by Smalltown Supersound on 18 June. Neneh Cherry and The Thing play Village Underground, London, on 15 July