West Hill Blast Quartet: Live At Cafe Oto

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Maggie Nicols (v)
Tony Marsh (perc)
Charlie Hart (b, vn)
Paul Jolly (b cl, s)
Terry Day (cond, perc, pipes, v, balloon
Dave Chamber (s)
Mike Figgis (t, g)
Davey Payne (s, f)
Ed Dean (g)
Mel Davis (t, f)
George Khan (saxes)
Brian Godding (g)
Adam Hart (p)

Label:

33Jazz

April/2016

Catalogue Number:

33Xtreme

RecordDate:

19 December 2008 to 28 October 2014

Although they draw on the vocabulary of free jazz, these four musicians are only, to varying degrees, free jazz musicians in any purist sense. Between them, they have played art rock, No Wave, psych-prog and more; Spicer, a journalist for this very magazine, and the force behind the recent Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival, is also a poet. This, perhaps, is their strength: Caines played in Keith Tippett's Arc, and Garside has released material on Emanem; Pyne comes from a different tradition, that of leftfield rock, and contributes not only drums but also the DIY label infrastructure that has allowed this disc to surface. What unites them, on the evidence of this live recording at least, is that each member of the quartet has ingested a large quantity of Albert Ayler, AACM and Ornette Coleman. Clustered around Brighton's Safehouse Collective, not all these guys are virtuosos, but they sure know how to commit – and their collective voice is quite a thing to behold.

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