Review: The Comet Is Coming, Canteen

Jazz at Canteen on a Saturday night? Surely some mistake – people want to dance! But dance they did, and happily, crowding the dance floor for The Comet Is Coming. With the imminent launch of their debut album Channel The Spirits  the left field buzz about this electro-acoustic jazz trio had grown to a mid-size hubbub that the Canteen audience were clearly aware of. The musical menu was simply established from the first number: hard-nosed drumming straight out of dance school, big synth sounds plundered from the classic analogue library and stabbing urgent sax. All three players – King Shabaka (Hutchings) on tenor sax, ‘Danalogue’ Dan Leavers behind the electronics and drummer Max Hallett aka Betamax Killer – were constantly bouncing and moving to the beats, each seemingly in their own world. Yet they were sticking closely to the plot: the music felt tightly disciplined, albeit in an improvisatory way, and nothing outstayed its welcome.

There’s an obvious link with the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra both in (unannounced) titles like Space Carnival and End of Earth and the exuberant mishmash of popular styles with a free jazz attitude that looked as much fun to play as to hear the music. Leavers and Hallett have a tight empathy forged in their previous duo Soccer 96 that provided the context for Hutchings’ insistent sax, allowing him to sit back until the right moment and then use the beat to slip and slide around it. Whenever he chose to snatch it up and locked himself into the groove, however, the impact was palpable, especially if he adopted the spitting staccato repetitious style of Melt Yourself Down bandmate Pete Wareham, but equally compelling were the long, wailing howls that seemed to emanate from some deep space origins.

The choice of electronic sounds was impeccable throughout, linking the heady electro-pop of the early 80s with contemporary dubstep and grime in a seamless continuum and when the fat basslines dropped in with Leavers’ dubwise sensibility they brought smiles all round. For all its considerable power Hallett’s drumming was far from unsubtle, too, somehow managing to both evoke and subvert dance music conventions at the same time. Combined with Hutchings’ effective and impassioned saxophone the trio produced sounds that could grow to massive proportions before suddenly clarifying into elemental simplicity, a cosmic contrast that proved exhilarating whenever they deployed it.

For a relatively newly-hatched project that grew from an unplanned 2013 encounter between Shabaka Hutchings and Soccer 96 the musical identity of The Comet Is Coming is already well-forged and, on the strength of their Canteen set, it would seem destined to win them a seriously energetic fanbase.