Matthew Herbert's Plat Du Jour

Premiered at the 2005 London Jazz Festival, sample innovator Matthew Herbert’s Plat Du Jour shocked, amused and compelled a packed QEH, while critics salivated over his conceptual feast, the evening’s highlight featuring 800 people simultaneously biting into apples, to create a sample for the album. It’s actually worth visiting the superbly informative www.platdujour.co.uk website just to get a full list of the many hundreds of sources, all food related, that Herbert has used for his samples, just so you have some idea of the breadth and depth his music, made from and all about food, and its central place in our diet obsessed society. With a ‘live’ chef preparing food onstage, and releasing prearranged smells into the audience, bang on cue, and a band that also creates samples ‘in situe’ and then plays them via EWI, Herbert quite literally shreds, minces and chops all musical boundaries and improvised jazz concepts in an utterly radical show.