Kings Place, Hall Two
Bristol jazz-rockers Get the Blessing deliver daft between-tunes gags with a winningly apologetic resignation, but there's nothing resigned, apologetic, or frivolous about their music. The quartet emerged in 2000, hitching the rhythmic engine of West Country trip-hoppers Portishead (bass guitarist Jim Barr and drummer Clive Deamer) to the improv and harmonies of musicians Pete Judge (trumpet) and Jake McMurchie (sax). The result was a two-horns sound, like early Ornette Coleman cruising over rock-trance funkiness, with a dose of looping minimalism. That chemistry has brought them popularity beyond the jazz cognoscenti, and busy gigging has had a transforming effect on the way they write and play together.
Last year's OC DC album was extensively featured, but the band also revisited earlier landmarks like the snorty, jittering and free-jazzy The Speed of Dark, from Bugs in Amber. Barr's impassively steady bass-hooks often kick things in, and a typically well-oiled one launched this show – with Pete Judge at first just tapping the trumpet's mouthpiece and bell to release abstract electronic sounds. Then McMurchie's dry-toned tenor sax introduced a languidly soulful theme, which Judge then enveloped in long-tone harmonies. Get the Blessing's increasingly reflexive four-way improv was urgently evident on the pounding follow-up, with McMurchie's guttural, Mike Breckerish attack and Judge's fluttering upper-register sounds tightly intertwined. The melancholy harmonies of American Meccano retained the eloquence of the OC DC album performance, even without that session's star vocal guest, Robert Wyatt. A theme inspired by Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman had an appropriately demented perkiness, and though the second set's opener had its more formulaic phrase-swapping moments, the spirit of John Coltrane sometimes seemed to hover over the ensuing horn laments and full-on free thrashes alike, and the handclapping Pentopia unlocked all of the gifted Deamer's capacity for subtle variation on metronomically spellbinding grooves.
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Rating: 4/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.
Bristol jazz-rockers Get the Blessing deliver daft between-tunes gags with a winningly apologetic resignation, but there's nothing resigned, apologetic, or frivolous about their music. The quartet emerged in 2000, hitching the rhythmic engine of West Country trip-hoppers Portishead (bass guitarist Jim Barr and drummer Clive Deamer) to the improv and harmonies of musicians Pete Judge (trumpet) and Jake McMurchie (sax). The result was a two-horns sound, like early Ornette Coleman cruising over rock-trance funkiness, with a dose of looping minimalism. That chemistry has brought them popularity beyond the jazz cognoscenti, and busy gigging has had a transforming effect on the way they write and play together.
Last year's OC DC album was extensively featured, but the band also revisited earlier landmarks like the snorty, jittering and free-jazzy The Speed of Dark, from Bugs in Amber. Barr's impassively steady bass-hooks often kick things in, and a typically well-oiled one launched this show – with Pete Judge at first just tapping the trumpet's mouthpiece and bell to release abstract electronic sounds. Then McMurchie's dry-toned tenor sax introduced a languidly soulful theme, which Judge then enveloped in long-tone harmonies. Get the Blessing's increasingly reflexive four-way improv was urgently evident on the pounding follow-up, with McMurchie's guttural, Mike Breckerish attack and Judge's fluttering upper-register sounds tightly intertwined. The melancholy harmonies of American Meccano retained the eloquence of the OC DC album performance, even without that session's star vocal guest, Robert Wyatt. A theme inspired by Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman had an appropriately demented perkiness, and though the second set's opener had its more formulaic phrase-swapping moments, the spirit of John Coltrane sometimes seemed to hover over the ensuing horn laments and full-on free thrashes alike, and the handclapping Pentopia unlocked all of the gifted Deamer's capacity for subtle variation on metronomically spellbinding grooves.
• What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnReview
Rating: 4/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.