Artist: Golden Age of Steam (The)

Date of Release: 24/05/2010

Catalogue no: BDV1086

Label: Babel

Price: £11.99

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Track Listing

This is the debut recording from The Golden Age of Steam, a new trio performing music composed by reeds player James Allsopp and featuring the outrageous drum stylings of other Fraud co-leader Tim Giles alongside the Hammond organizing of keyboard wizard Kit Downes, winner of the BBC Jazz Award for Rising Star in 2007. These compositions attempt to create new structural spaces for improvisation by establishing highly ambiguous soundworlds that explore the intangible area inbetween tonality, rhythm, and total improv freedom. These pieces are inspired by the combination of anarchic playfulness and formal logics of Ligeti's music, the joyous sax thunder of Coltrane and Ayler and the twisted lyricism of Captain Beefheart among others.

Reviews

23/09/2010 John Fordham, The Guardian ****

If you like Polar Bear, you'll almost certainly go for this remarkable UK trio, which includes this year's Mercury nominee Kit Downes on Hammond organ. As with Polar Bear, there are themes that often have jazz inflections but deployed in eccentric ways, and the players have a taste for slow builds and unusual instrumental colours – in this case the frequent use of minimally noodling, churchily plaintive treble figures from Downes's organ, set against rugged tenor sax or bass clarinet sounds, and creative percussion–playing that mixes power and playful surprises. The trio features multi-reeds player and composer James Allsopp and drummer Tim Giles alongside Downes, and the structured parts are as absorbing as the improvising, and often indistinguishable from it. Meditative bass clarinet figures weave around the spooky Hammond before slow, crunching grooves crank up and darkly repetitive themes follow. Multiphonic, pad-flapping tenor sax sounds echo Evan Parker; the title track is a repeating tenor motif that begins to stretch out over Giles's remorseless groove; and the improvised counterpoint of the organ and tenor later in the set is inspired.