Twang. Thump. Crash. More twang.

Finding Ways is the name of the drummer/composer Seb Rochford’s new band. It’s also the title of their debut album, which they played at the Cockpit Theatre in north-west London last night, as part of the Jazz in the Round series. It was one of the events featured on the closing night of the 2025 EFG London Jazz Festival, and I couldn’t imagine a happier way of ending the 10-day programme.

Rochford has made some intriguing choices in his career, but probably none more surprising than this. Finding Ways is a guitar-instrumental band: three guitarists, to be precise, plus bass guitar and drums. I don’t think I’ve seen such a line-up live since an early incarnation of Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer back In 1968. Or at least not one so memorable.

Last night’s guitarists were David Preston, Tara Cunningham and Matt Hurley, joined by Anders Christensen on bass guitar. One thing that stuck out straight away was the absence of pedal boards or other effects. No wah-wahs, no phasing, no tremolo arms. This, apparently, was at Rochford’s insistence. So what we heard was three versions of the sort of sound you made when you got your first electric guitar, hit an E major chord and then looked for a way to make the strings twang. A sound with innocence intact. And an interesting approach to apply to three very sophisticated players.

So what was the result? Surf music in space, maybe. The Ventures or Dick Dale and the Del-Tones with Derek Bailey or Sonny Sharrock sitting in. Rochford’s tunes for this line-up are sometimes based on simple two-bar chord modules reminiscent of the twangtastic “Walk, Don’t Run” or “Misirlou” (and occasionally finding beguiling elaborations of the format, as on the soaring “People Say Stuff, Don’t Be Disheartened”). Also springing to mind: the free-form guitar conversations of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in the Grateful Dead and of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television: “Dark Star” or “Marquee Moon” but with different perspectives.

It was great to see the band in this environment, arranged in a circle, the musicians locked into each other, watching for cues, tidying up small errors but letting rough edges show as they exploited the spaces left for spontaneity within the structures. Furiously loud in some places (driven by Rochford’s brutal energy), it was surprisingly lyrical in others; I don’t think I’ve ever heard three electric guitars played as softly as in the filigreed three-way conversation between Cunningham, Hurley and Preston that formed the delightfully unexpected coda to “Community”, which had started out as a reggae piece.

In this intimate setting, the musicians’ very visible sharing of their pleasure extended to the audience and was washed back in return. They were having fun, and so were we.

* Finding Ways is out now on Edition Records. The photos of Sebastian Rochford and Tara Cunningham at the Cockpit were taken by Steven Cropper and are used by kind permission.