Jazz: F-IRE Collective
Clive Davis at Queen Elizabeth Hall
In a way, the symbolism is as important as the music. Jazz musicians are
rightly wary of marketing gimmicks, but if they are going to reach out
to an audience that is weary of pop trivia, they are going to have to
pay more attention to the culture that surrounds them. Polite choruses
of Ornithology really aren't going to cut it any more.
That goes a long way to explaining why there has been so much excitement
surrounding the London-based F-IRE Collective. These are players who are
inventing their own protocol as they go along, ignoring record company
mantras and the demarcation lines between jazz, rock and world music,
much as the members of Loose Tubes rewrote the rulebook in the 1980s.
Two of the groups to emerge from this new pool of improvisers — Pete
Wareham's Acoustic Ladyland and Sebastian Rochford's Polar Bear —
have already made an impression on listeners who would not normally think
of buying a British jazz album. This ambitious South Bank concert went
a step further and merged a dozen or more musicians into a loosely structured
ensemble performance which veered between moments of visceral energy and
some diffuse, under-rehearsed passages. In those latter moments you could
not help thinking that an older hand — Mike Westbrook, for nstance
— would have had a much firmer grip of the material.
Rochford was a volcanic presence throughout, however, pushing
and prodding soloists and summoning up some apocalyptic climaxes. His
own piece, Beartown, proved the highlight of the evening, the small-group
setting and asymmetrical pulse evoking some bleary-eyed Slavic dance band.
The guitarist David Okumu's Afrobeat finale generated truly impressive
momentum, but then drifted into long-winded funk patterns, as did the
pianist Robert Mitchell's A Heart Full of You,
one of several pieces that featured the lithe singer Julia Biel.
At moments like this, the collective's debt to New York's
M-Base circle is a little too obvious. M-Base has always been long on
righteous, back-to-the-streets rhetoric, and shorter on interesting
melodies. The F-IRE Collective has enough talent not to walk in anyone's
shadow.
