Music / British jazz
Review: Tom Barford’s Asterope, Hen & Chicken
This gig was a bit of a punt – Asterope are a bunch of new-to-me names fresh out of the Royal Academy’s jazz nursery, albeit led by the winner of the 2017 Kenny Wheeler Prize and en route to Real World studios to record their debut album for Edition Records. First impressions, however, weren’t too reassuring. They warmed up with McCoy Tyner’s Blues on the Corner, a safe choice that got a fairly cautious treatment replete with long and at times meandering solos. The five players looked awkward on stage, too, each locked into their own space.
It was a tense start that, happily, began a steady thaw as Asterope moved on to the original music that will make up their projected album. A segue of Highly Strung Trapeze Artists and Space to Dream laid out saxophonist Tom Barford’s compositional style, with complex and contrasting ideas layered together and conscious use of the player permutations within a quintet. Thus tight-knit interactions between Billy Marrows’ guitar and the leader’s tenor sax could be buoyed by a well-oiled rhythm section that then dissipated into a more spacious sound as Flo Moore’s bass and Dave Storey’s drums pulled back to leave Rupert Cox’s piano in a flittering trio with sax and guitar.
The first set closed with F Stop, a 7-time funk whose broken beat was just unsettling enough. By this time the players all seemed to have relaxed and their playing was opening out nicely. The tune began with an intricate and interesting tenor sax solo that showed why Tom had snagged that Kenny Wheeler Prize and featured a stylish, looping guitar solo and emphatic bass guitar that combined in a contemporary update on the Weather Report sound.
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The rest of the evening was pure pleasure, really, with notable moments including the elegant Ideology trio of guitar, drums and soprano sax and the ambitious programme piece Music for an Imagined Film which let Rupert Cox ranged through styles from silent film honky tonk to portentuous neo-classical statements and ended with a pastoral duet with soprano sax. The complexities of Razztwizzler largely hung on Flo Moore’s urgently stumbling bass guitar, a solid foundation for an uninhibited solo from Cox and some old-school fusion guitar work to pay it out. It all seemed to fit together perfectly with Storey’s allusive and thoughtful drumming.
A final offering of Night and Day showed how far things had moved since that hesitant start: the standard got an assured and refreshing arrangement with all five players looking (and sounding) like they were enjoying themselves and Flo Moore’s spirited solo was exceptional. It will be interesting to hear how it all works out on record but it seems certain that these young players will all be names to remember for the future.
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