Friday 29 May 2009, 8pm
From Lyon, avant-primitivism of real beauty on flute, voice and an assortment of percussion courtesy of Kelly Jones and Pascal Nichols
Review from The Wire
“ Part Wild Horses Mane On Both
Sides occupy the same liminal zone between free jazz and abstract sound as Flaherty/Corsano. The duo of drummer Pascal Nichols (recent stalwart of the UK underground scene as a member of groups like Stuckometer, Uboat and Neon Tempal) and flautist Kelly Jones play a form of improvised music that references many totemic fire music sources -John Coltrane’s LSD-inspired masterpiece Om, the classic Don Cherry/Ed Blackwell Mu sessions or, more specifically, Cherry’s soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain -while subverting them with a punk primitive attack that owes as much to Leeds’s drone pioneers Vibracathedral Orchestra as it does to the Fluxus-inspired ritual of Japan’s Taj Mahal Travellers.
Nichols is a studied post-Corsano conceptualist, tackling his stripped down kit with a non-stop gush of ideas. I’ve seen him play several times of the past few years and always enjoyed it. He sits out for long periods of time, occasionally ornamenting the attack with bowed skins or gong tones, and when he does pick it up, he makes directly for its heart, marching beautiful statements of time heading into Jones’s flute instants. Jones ‘s ..playing here is sublime. She combines breathy, reflective phrasing with a grunting one-lung style that is as heavenly as it is simplistic, birthing the kind of revelatory, pre-articulate ugh that would connect the devotional sound of Popol Vuh with the body raunch of Arthur Doyle.
Although the music is improvised, Jones never seems lost for ideas; her focus is melodic, hyper-concise, and she works revenant echoes of ethnic motifs into the mix without ever falling into the shamen-in-tie-dyed-pyjamas schtick of so many would-be jazz ’mystics.’ And for all its punk credentials, the bulk of the music is quiet, introspective, zoned. ..there are long periods of silence barely illuminated by Jones’s fluttering shakuhachi-like tone, displaying the kind of weighty, minimalist logic of Japanese ’rock ’n’ roll shakuhachi’ player Sabu Orimo. It’s jazz in terms of the organisational hierarchy that it’s filtered through, it’s psychedelic in that it’s keyed to an unusual feel for time and space, and it’s punk in that it refuses any previous mode of getting there. So is it punk jazz? This time, just maybe.” - David Keenan
Tony Marsh - Solo
Tony Marsh is a regular player on the London improvising scene who, according to The Guardian's Richard Williams has a: "marvelous ability to erase the boundary between time and no-time" and "an exquisite feeling for percussive texture". Tony regularly plays with Evan Parker, John Edwards, Paul Dunmall, Nick Stevens, The London Improvisers Orchestra and many others. Tonight he will be performing Percussion over Heaven a recent solo project that has only been publicly performed once before at Café Oto earlier this year.
