Music / Jazz
One more time …
Check the Strange Brew listings and, alarmingly, you’ll see: ‘Erratic Batting: Tezeta’s Last Ever Show’. Then you notice the date: Friday April 1st. Aha! But no, it’s not an April fool thing and after seven years Bristol’s splendid Ethio-jazz groove machine really have decided to call it quits and go their separate ways. Band-leader, composer and keyboard player Dan Inzani explains why: “Basically it’s no longer active as a band – we haven’t played a new song in years and now we live in six different cities from Cornwall to London. During the pandemic everybody has got on with new projects and in the end Tezeta was one too many. I will miss it, of course, but it seems like a mature kind of decision to make.”
The band formed out of Bristol’s Bloom Collective back in 2015 when a few of the musicians discovered a shared interest in Ethio-jazz’s distinctive blend of jazz, funk and Middle Eastern style and decided to try to capture the sound. Beginning with a set of covers of tunes by vibraphonist Mulatu Astatke, the music’s founder back in the 70s, Dan soon adapted a set of self-penned prog-jazz material to the style and they released their debut album Seventh Place in 2016 to great acclaim. The inspiration of Ethio-jazz was always just the starting point for Tezeta, however, and playing live the individual voices of guitarist Conrad Singh, saxophonists Andrew Neil Hayes and Lorenzo Prati and Pete Gibbs on bass all enriched the sound with added jazz, rock and funk influences.
Tezeta – (back row) Lorenzo Prati, Pete Gibbs, Daniel Truen, Andrew Neil Hayes, Daniel Inzani. (front row) Conrad Singh, Matt Jones, Harriet Riley
The band’s sprawling 8-piece line-up was especially eye-catching for Harriet Riley’s vibraphone and marimba set-up and the twin drum kits of Matt Jones and Daniel Truen. It seems these features were each happy accidents in the band’s development, as Dan recalls: “We didn’t mean to have two drummers but when Matt couldn’t make a gig date we decided to rehearse with Daniel Truen as well so he could learn from Matt. It sounded so good we decided to try it out at another gig and it was just better with both of them. And we had another vibraphone player originally but he left for a summer season with the circus. Someone remembered they had seen Harriet playing in her father’s Frank Zappa tribute band when she was just seventeen. I tracked her down and it turned out she had just finished her studies in Cardiff and was moving to Bristol the next week! So we pretty much got first dibs on Harriet.”
is needed now More than ever
Daniel Inzani and Harriet Riley (photo: Tony Benjamin)
But the last two years have seen Harriet, Conrad, Andrew and the others embark on a number of new and diverse projects all of which are gathering steam while Tezeta had seemingly ground to a halt. Dan Inzani is himself working on an ambitious multi-faceted composition project for which he was finally able to get Arts Council funding this year. Something had to give and it turns out that was Tezeta, hence that ‘last ever show’. “It might end up being a bit of an emotional thing,” Dan concedes. “But bands aren’t forever and we’ve already done the good thing we set out to do. We all learned from it, it’s a precious thing to us and we’re all great friends – and I don’t think that’s ending.”
Tezeta, with support from Dubi Dolczek play Strange Brew on Friday April 1
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