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Posts tagged ‘Caius Williams’

Nov 22

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Tom Skinner at the QEH

The trouble with the EFG London Jazz Festival is that it’s all too much. Given 300 gigs in 10 days, there’s always going to be something you regret missing. Last night I badly wanted to hear the Weather Station — the marvellous Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman — with a string quartet at EartH in Dalston. But I also wanted to hear the drummer-composer Tom Skinner and his band perform their new album, Kaleidoscopic Visions, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I’d seen the Weather Station in Islington at the start of this year. I hadn’t seen Skinner since 2022. So that’s how my decision was made.

In the end, any regrets were overwhelmed by events. Skinner and his six colleagues — Chelsea Carmichael (flute and tenor saxophone), Robert Stillman (soprano and tenor saxophones), Yaffra (keyboards, voice and percussion), Adrian Utley (guitar), Kareem Dayes (cello) and Caius Williams (bass) — started the concert with watchful discretion. But over the course of 90 minutes they built the music until it had become a living, pulsing thing, full of narratives, individual and collective.

Skinner writes deceptively simple, sometimes folk-like melodies that exist in essential dialogue with the riffs and other figures devised to help form a unified matrix. The textures are airy, with room for light and shade. (That’s a reflection of his superbly flexible drumming, in which power is used with restraint.) There are solos on top of prepared accompaniment — those from Utley and Carmichael, cutting loose on tenor, were quite remarkable — but often the improvising is done in small groupings.

A string trio of Williams’s bowed bass, Dayes’ pizzicato cello and the guitar of Utley, making use of sustain and the volume pedal to eliminate attack, was beautifully realised, as was an unaccompanied tenor saxophone duet by Stillman and Carmichael. I’d been listening to their spontaneous interlocking pointilliste figures for a couple of minutes before I realised that the dialogue sounded like a solo tenor improvisation by Evan Parker, its components broken down and distributed between the two players to create an actual version of the conversation that Parker’s playing often resembles. And there was also a real conversation between Skinner and Yaffra, who moved from his keyboards to play a pair of tom-toms with tympani beaters, the two of them sending a gentle thunder rolling around the hall.

I wrote with some enthusiasm about the album a few weeks ago, but the concert did what concerts should do: it warmed the blood in the music’s veins, allowing it to grow. I’d have been very sad to miss it. Now I hope Skinner follows the practice he established with his earlier project, Voices of Bishara, and releases the live version of Kaleidoscopic Visions. Last night’s, if possible.

Aug 5

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On Kit Downes

One night a few weeks ago I was at the Vortex, listening to a hour of free improvisation performed in the downstairs bar by the pianist Kit Downes with the saxophonist Tom Challenger, his familiar colleague, the drummer Andrew Lisle, and two names new to me; the guitarist Tara Cunningham and the bassist Caius Williams. It was a lovely set, full of lyricism and surprises. Downes, Challenger and Lisle are entirely at home in such an environment; it was a pleasure to hear the contributions of Cunningham, making an intriguing adaptation of the innovations associated with Derek Bailey, and Williams, who produced not just supple and responsive lines but the loveliest tone I’ve heard from an upright bass for ages.

Then I went home to resume listening to a new CD sent to me from Amsterdam, where the celebrated Bimhuis club had recorded Downes’s multinational 10-piece band playing an extended piece titled Dr Snap — one of a series of four “composition assignments reflecting the current zeitgeist” commissioned, under the overall heading of Reflex, from four different composers — and to Outpost of Dreams, Kit’s new album of duets with Norma Winstone on the ECM label.

Recorded live at the Bimhuis in November 2022, Dr Snap consists of seven pieces by Downes, one by Challenger and two by the bassist Petter Eldh. It begins in a deceptively mild manner — twitchy rhythms, knotty woodwind themes — before broadening and deepening as it goes on, opening out to expose exceptional work from the trumpeter Percy Pursglove, the saxophonists Ben van Gelder and Robin Fincker, the flautist Ketije Ringe Karahona, the guitarist Reinier Baas, the bassist Petter Eldh, and the drummers and percussionists Sun-Mi Hong, James Maddren and Veslemøy Narvesen, Plus, of course, the composer’s piano.

Like a lot of today’s jazz writing, it requires 11 fingers on one hand and seven on the other if you want to try and decipher the time signatures. But no such technical analysis is required for a simpler enjoyment of the music as it passes by, hastening without rushing, guided through its endless twists and turns by the highly inventive rhythm section.

There’s a lot of variety here, from passages of hustling density to a lovely stretch of serenity in “Pantheon 4”, a feature for Karahona, via the use of free-jazz techniques behind Pursglove on “Snapdraks”. The solos arise naturally, part of the overall design — as they did, for instance, in the recordings of Steve Lehman’s octet. Three-quarters of a century after what became known as the Birth of the Cool sessions, this kind of jazz for medium-sized ensembles continues to evolve in a very stimulating way.

Downes’s duo with Winstone is a meeting of minds as well as generations (he is 38, she is 82). His tunes join those of John Taylor, Ralph Towner and Adam O’Rourke as vehicles for her lyrics, which are full of elegant, often wistful references to nature and the seasons, to sky and light and wind and their effect on the senses. There are also fine versions of “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” and of a traditional tune arranged by the late Bob Cornford, titled “Rowing Home”. From the latter, was there ever a more ECM-evoking opening to a lyric than “Upon the lake in winter sun / A sun that bleaches the sky…”?

As further evidence of Downes’s scope, there’s a forthcoming trio LP called Breaking the Shell on which he plays pipe organ with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the drummer Andrew Cyrille. A track called “Este a Székelyeknél”, released on Bandcamp by the Red Hook label this week, suggests that this, too, will be a notable addition to the body of work being assembled by one of the most consistently stimulating musicians of our time.

* Dr Snap is on the Bimhuis label and Outpost of Dreams is on ECM, both albums out now. Breaking the Shell is released by Red Hook on September 27. The photograph of Kit Downes with the Dr Snap band was taken at the Bimhuis by Maarten Nauw.