TOC are this French trio I often mistake for a “jazz” combo, but the threesome of Ivann Cruz, Jérémie Ternoy, and Peter Orins have a lot to offer in the wide field of free playing, happy to embrace elements from rock, post-rock, and improvisation alike. The same Catholic spirit abounds across many releases on the Circum-Disc label and its multiple open-minded releases which sometimes touch five bases at once, no fingers allowed.
I think TOC are now celebrating 15 years of playing together, and wanted to mark the occasion with this four CD set Did It Again (CIRCUM DISC CIDI2202 / TOUR DE BRAS TDB9062cd), which offers a number of live sets from 2021 (and one from 2008) with the same lavish generosity previously reserved for Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa box sets. Since each disc presents some 40-odd minutes of non-stop playing and no index points to help navigate your way, you need to dive in the deep end and stay there if you want to do justice to the full TOC sandwich. At one level all of this unedited playing may appear to be somewhat sprawling and self-indulgent, lacking the intensity of a Miles Davis “electric period” bootleg, but the sound they make (Fender Rhodes piano, electric guitar, drums and pedal bass) has many opportunities for tasty bacon-fried curlicues and plangent echo-plexed tubs of coleslaw on the side. For me it’s my man Cruz to whom I’ll be returning when I want additional helpings of wayward and demented shredding, especially when he spins off into his own orbit and doesn’t wait for the others to catch him up, but Ternoy’s a maestro of the Fender Rhodes complex tangle-rattle clank, and could almost have faced down Joe Zawinul in any given Dark Magus standoff.
Quite a cheek to name your album after a Kevin Ayers / Soft Machine song (or part of it, anyway), but I’m sure our French geniuses all own well-worn copies of the Third album on CBS. Listening to this crazy high-energy malarkey is exhausting enough, but try reading the over-engineered sleeve notes by Petr Slaby, which amount to a blow-by blow sports commentary of some unknown Olympics event. He even reprises his old reviews of previous records by this band he loves so much. Jointly issued by Tour De Bras in Canada. (25/07/2022)