TIMELINE | PRESS/straight no chaser

London music magazine Straight No Chaser ran an article on us. Unfortunately there was some confusion for them between the two bands they checked out ( Timeline and Méta Méta ) - So for 'David Okumu guitarist' read 'David Pattman percussionist' and it will make more sense. (if you've got this far into our website, you probably have a fairly good idea of what we do - Méta Méta is batá fusion, Timeline is other stuff)

Review by Neil Bennun in 'Straight No Chaser' October 1999

When you adopt a Santero deity, an orisha in Cuba (or, rather, when an orisha adopts you), they say you've 'taken the saint'. Timeline have taken the saint and proceeded to bring it back again somewhat…altered. This is a family affair: a battery of fully-qualified batá drummers, with guitar, bass, keyboards, sax, a percussion-playing choir or singers and an approach to time signatures owing a little to Steve Coleman's New York future funk making a seriously deep noise. This is jazz and music of West African origin with the internal organs joined. Part of an umbrella organisation called 'F-IRE' (Fellowship for Integrated Rhythmic Expression), an organisation with a specific cultural and musical philosophy with the website to prove it, Timeline are one of the country's most exciting jazz acts in performance. They're on a mission and they love doing what they do. Quietly spoken macrobiotic bandleader and philosopher-in-chief Barak Schmool gave us the lowdown.

"I haven't stopped studying", says Barak on the source of the African and santero rhythms that drive Timeline. "None of us have stopped studying. David [Okumu, guitarist] knows the tradition and he's active in passing it on; one of our members, Amanda Vincent, is researching in Nigeria and there are plenty of people around who know the songs and the rhythms. Even in Cuba people learn drumming and dances without knowing the meaning at first; there's a meaning beyond the words. The important thing is the fact that people are simply expressing stuff together".

Timeline have an approach to integrating traditional musical forms that's pretty much died out in Europe: "If you're learning or creating music in Britain, you're told "copy this or else make up your own thing". There's nothing in the middle. There isn't the understanding that what you're doing is part of a language, that the point is expressing something and that that doesn't necessarily mean making something new: it means doing it like it's a part of what you do."

Timeline with guests will be performing at the F-IRE festival early next year and conjure some orishas on November 5th and 19th and December 9th at the Spitz in London Spitalfields Market, and at the North Westminster Community School Studio Theatre on February 24th; what's more, you have the opportunity to taste Timeline's left-field collaborative intentions on March 3rd at the Purcell Rooms at the South Bank in performance with Bullies Ballerinas, a jazz dance group who mix African dance with jazz dance and Lindy-Hop. And if you can see the joins you're some anthropologist indeed. Check www.f-ire.com for the full coup.