“Welcome to the third People Band gig of the 21st Century,” declared bassist Charlie Hart. In fact it was the fourth, but the People Band have never been fastidious over detail. The point was that we were about to experience an event. 40 years after Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts produced their first and only LP, this joyously anarchic freely improvising ensemble were back together again. Or rather, saxophonist and flutist George Khan, hand-drummer Tony Edwards and Terry Day playing bamboo pipes, snare drum and cymbals were back together from that line-up, joined by various associates from later incarnations. Some remarked that Café Oto reminded them of spaces they had played in Amsterdam during the early 1970s. The acoustics of this Dalston venue are not perfect; the architecture gulps up some of the sound. But Café Oto’s relaxed, open atmosphere couldn’t have been better suited for a People Band reunion.
A group huddle preceded the music, deciding the broad format of the evening - a couple of smaller combinations, then the full octet. The hip hornet buzz of one of Terry Day’s homemade reed instruments summoned the collective heft into existence. Broadly speaking it’s free jazz, but like an adaptable organism the People Band accommodates personal idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, it can be a tense tussle of egos or an uplifting fusion of kindred spirits. Drummer Tony Marsh, a veteran of the London improv scene but a recent recruit to People Band ranks, supplied a constant flow of billow and drive, providing the rolling groundswell of the overall sound or locking into swirling patterns with Edwards, Day and Charlie Hart. Hart’s brother Adam played often bluesy piano and at one point read a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem. Mike Figgis, now a big name in film, brought his cornet along but was more distinctive on electric guitar - finding scratchy stridulations to match Day’s rasping reed, doodling around Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” or chopping out brash chords to ignite a response from the marvellous frontline horns.
The evening culminated in an incendiary tenor workout between George Khan, Paul Jolly and Davey Payne that reached deep into the core of still molten People Band energies. Khan long ago diverted much of his time into acting, but his tenor playing - indebted at heart to Sonny Rollins yet always ready to tear up the map and set fire to the safety net- remains one of the most exhilarating and undervalued voices in British jazz. Jolly, who opened the second half with an elegantly constructed bass clarinet solo, carried much of that reflective sense of shape and direction into the heart of the tenor turbulence. And erstwhile Blockhead Davey Payne gave flesh and blood to the spirit of sound itself in ecstatically raucous figures that suggested Earl Bostic possessed by Albert Ayler’s daemons, lurid yet magnificent. Contextualize it how you will there’s nothing quite like a People Band gig. That profound inner glow is something rare.” -
Julian Cowley, The Wire 2008
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