Album: 137 - Strangeness Oscillations

Something of a jazz supergroup this one: with drum virtuoso, the ubiquitous Seb Rochford, Jim Bar of Get the Blessing, Adrian Utley – formerly of Portishead, a prolific collaborator and producer, but with a heart rooted in jazz, and sax and flute-player Larry Stabbins, among other credits a  co-founder of Working Week, recently returned from 10 years’ sailing around the world.

Playing mostly improvised music, and deftly navigating a space between fierceness and sensitivity, the four musicians (and friends) have created a dialogue of singular voices that converse and battle with extraordinary fluency, an openness to listening, and a miraculously shared sense of evolving form.  There is a lot of free jazz bombast here, and that’s meant as a compliment. Not surprising given Larry Stabbins’s background in British free jazz. The music screams at times – perhaps a sign of our troubled times, in which only passionate outcries against inhumanity, corruption and stupidity, carry much weight. The opening and closing tacks “First Idea Pt 1” and “First Idea Pt 2” top and tail the very varied rest of the album with bursts of fury, from Stabbins’s tenor sax, travelling beyond the outposts of territory once explored by John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler, and slices of brash guitar from Utley, sounds which reach back to Hendrix and other masters of distortion, but once again in dark and vehement language of his own.

On “Drums and Sax”, Seb Rochford’s demonic yet sophisticated drumming, a complex cascade of super-imposed rhythms, duets with Adrian Utley’s guitar and Stabbins’s screeching sax. On “Bass Claarinet One”, the wild saxophonist switches to a much softer and alluring sound, exploiting the flute’s capacity for swirling and smokey melodic lines, whose soothing quality comes as a welcome balm after the chaos of the freer material. The same mood is achieved, but with a flavour of its own, rooted in intricate bass lines, the flute reminiscent of Debussy, with subtle touches of bass clarinet, and more gentle percussion from Rochford.

Adrian Utley does ferocious riffs on the guitar, but he reveals another side to his nature, with delicate and soulful explorations of the electric guitar’s sonic possibilities: this is a delight on “Ade’s Tune”, a gentle and meandering track, with a rhythmic lilt reminiscent of some of the John Coltrane’s modal explorations. He also offers some subtle but characterful interventions on the synths – modular synthesisers and other vintage electronics are a passion of his – added colour to a bubbling mix of collective exploration and invention.

• Strangeness Oscillation can be ordered here
• 137 are playing at The Exchange, Bristol on 29th July, The Lexington, London 31st July