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February 2007
gig reviews

Alex Bonney Quartet
Soren Norbo with Django Bates
Ian Shaw
MA
John Donaldson Trio
Bheki Mseleku
Fraud
Gwilym Simcock
Basquiat Strings with Seb Rochford

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February 2007 gig reviews by Chris Parker

Alex Bonney Quartet

Thursday 1 February

Albert Ayler isn't a name you frequently hear on bandstands these days, nor is it often mentioned in the press, so it was odd to read it in the Guardian (in connection with the film of his life, Kasper Collin's My Name is Albert Ayler) on Wednesday, then to be confronted, by the Alex Bonney Quartet the following day (Thursday, 1), with a set of his music.

Photographer and writer Val Wilmer knew Ayler well, and she is quoted in John Fordham's Guardian article: '[Ayler] was a very spiritual person, but also very attractive and charming. You could see his real nature, though. He was somewhere else.'

Trumpeter Bonney's quartet (completed by tenor player Robin Fincker, bassist Johnny Brierley and whip-smart drummer Jeff Williams) might have been attempting to vindicate Wilmer's assessment in their hour-long set, approaching the familiar Ayler themes with clear respect for all the elements of her description: spirituality, charm and other-worldliness.

Typically, Ayler's themes have a simple sincerity that renders them almost hymnic or anthemic, and Fincker and Bonney stated them with appropriate emotional candour, but it was their rubato explorations of them, stoked by Williams's sensitive but assertive drumming and Brierley's sudden bass flurries, that formed the meat of the set.

Both Bonney, with his sparing but telling use of vibrato and vocalised tones, and Fincker, whose controlled fervour seems more impressive with each successive Vortex appearance, set a sensible course between the Scylla of outright re-creation of the Ayler brothers' sound and the Charybdis of using their material merely as a springboard for frolics of their own; it was reminiscent of a sadly underrated band of the 1990s, led by Chris Batchelor and Steve Buckley, which did a similar balancing act with Ornette Coleman material. An unexpected treat.

 

 

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