Three new items from the Discus Music label, all arrived 7th November 2022.
Green Money (DISCUS 142CD) is by Day Evans Dale Ensemble, a group of English players having a tilt at that most recherché of genres, that of Jazz Poetry. I’m by no means an expert, though I did enjoy the Righteous reissue of Jazz Canto, a 1958 LP featuring the work of Bob Dorough, Ben Wright, and John Carradine, and as far as I can make out, it has nothing to do with the clichéd image of beatniks rapping about nuclear war over a flute and pair of bongos in an espresso cafe in the Lower East Side. Here, Steve Day intones the words to several poems of his (except one written by Jennie Osborne) with his own percussion backdrops, and the playing of Peter Evans (violin), Julian Dale (bass & cello), and Mark Langford (woodwinds, piano). Label boss Martin Archer also appears, along with Discus regulars Charlotte Keeffe and Peter Fairclough. Having made a somewhat impulsive claim for “jazz poetry”, I’ll now admit the music is actually pretty hard to piegonhole, mostly providing a slow and mysterious and drifty ethereal screen through which to behold the illuminated utterances of Steve Day. Non-jazz idioms are permitted; on ‘The Swan in the Evening’, the violinist quotes the melody of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, the notable English folk song once sung by Anne Briggs. Six-panel digipak includes a libretto of all the poems, some of which may be symbol-laden critiques of modern life, delivered from a vaguely Marxist viewpoint.
If you enjoy spoken-word utterances with your music, you might also enjoy Obscurer Subjectivity (DISCUS 144CD) by Meson. Bo Meson is a true eccentric whose highly idiosyncratic views and approaches have long been cultivated by Martin Archer, and his playing – along with Andy McAuley, Jez Creek, Peter Rophone and Sarah Palmer – is used here to accompany the bizarre vocal recits of this wild-haired individual. I get the impression he’s a real pariah in today’s conformist society, projecting a “crusty” vibe, and proud of his run-ins with the police. First impressions of these garbled, incomprehensible mutterings suggest a deeply critical take on all the precepts of Western civilisation, but after listening to some of the cuts and attempting to decipher the free-form printed texts, I’m now less than certain about anything. The record is apparently the result of a very spontaneous collective effort in the studio, where Bo Meson bit his lip and listened attentively to McAuley’s admonitions to pull his socks up, and the backing band are described as “improvising rock musicians”. Archer’s comparisons with The Fall and Gong don’t really hold water (Meson hasn’t any of Daevid Allen’s loopy charisma nor a fraction of Mark E. Smith’s deep psychic insight), but this release is certainly unlike most things you’ll have heard.
After those two “talkies”, Ripples (DISCUS 145CD) is all-instrumental music performed by Martin Pyne and his vibraphone and David Beebee on his Fender Rhodes electric piano. Indeed the whole album seems to be not much more ambitious than a simple experiment to find out what these two instruments would sound like when duetting in the studio, and Pyne was pleased by the way both instruments sonically blended into each other. Hence the title Ripples – and his thoughts about what he regards as the “liquid quality” of the music have led him to refer to rivers and water sprites in some of the titles, as well as deeper philosophical themes about “transience and imperfection” and a political remark about a contemporary hot topic, that of refugees. As seasoned jazz fans know, the Fender Rhodes really took off on jazz records after Bitches Brew, and led to the birth of Weather Report plus its continued use by many other jazz-fusion professionals in the 1970s. Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea, two leading exponents, played this difficult instrument with speed and exuberance, not words I’d associate with the languid playing of Beebee here. Pyne likewise seems to be half-asleep, which is disappointing after his zesty playing on hi res heart from 2021. It’s very hard to discern the improvisational elements on this non-jazz record, most of which is soporific easy listening, completely lacking in tension, aural décor for listeners who don’t really like jazz at all, but somehow feel they ought to.