Review: Dakhla Brass, Future Inn

So – Dakhla launch their third album, eh? Actually, no. It’s fairer to say that Dakhla Brass launched their first album to a suitably crowded Future Inn jazz session. The distinction is important – since the Dakhla quartet released 2013’s The Eye of Icarus they have gained a fifth voice (Liam Treasure’s trombone) and undeniably grown in confidence and musical vision. The subtle name change to Dakhla Brass thus reflects a new era for this already impressive and original outfit. 

This launch gig for Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla made the point emphatically by beginning with a warm up set of familiar tnumbers from the first two albums, using tracks like the slow burn Imber and the tightly-wrapped Vista to lay out the band’s basic principles of hard-nosed rhythm, close harmony brass chords and counterpointed voices calling between horns and reeds, trumpet and alto, everyone and the drummer … It wasn’t jazz, as such (they once wrote a song dismissively called ‘Too Jazz’ ) more like composed brass music with moments of carefully chosen disruption allowing one of them to veer off into more improvised territory for a while. 

That first set was great, the songs clearly fleshed out by familiarity and experience and Matt Brown’s creative precision on drums as vocal as any of the impeccably played melody instruments. But it was when they returned to play Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla in its entirety that we saw Dakhla Brass become a reality that will eclipse those fine beginnings. Written for five players, with Charlotte Ostafew’s baritone sax liberated from bassline duties by that trombone and with Pete Judge’s trumpet and Sophie Stockham’s alto sax now empathetically close in style, this was a new set of wide-ranging and complex music that has enormous potential to expand even further.

Opening with The Order of the Elephant, a suitably galumphing beat piece that re-introduced their individual voices, the set moved on to tracks like Spread Eagle Hill, a reflective chordal piece with no big beats whatever and Sunday Monday’s filmic combination of snappy sax bursts with meditative trumpet. The structures of these pieces were all incredibly complex, so playing them without recourse to sheet music was bogglingly impressive.

If there were moments when Charlotte Ostafew’s eyes were flashing signals from behind her big brass machinery there was no sign of mistakes in the playing and the title track Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla was a complete celebration of their new-found assertiveness. The original Dakhla’s flavours were all there – Judge’s flamenco trumpet on Big Red and Trireme, Stockham and Ostafew’s Arabic ornamentation on Sunday Monday, Brown’s rhythmically deconstructed Drum and Bass on Dragon No Good.

Their website tag list of “jazz, afrobeat, avant garde, balkan brass, composition, drums, horns, New Orleans, World, Bristol” pretty much gets it right, until those last two: for Dakhla Brass it surely must now be Bristol first and the world will inevitably follow?