Winner of the Parliamentary Jazz Award for Best Media, 2019

by Tim Owen

August 20, 2010

/ ALBUM

This could be an awesome proposition as a long-running concern, though they'd have to excel themselves to top this.

Decoy & Joe McPhee

Oto

Bo’Weavil Records

Joe McPhee - Tenor and soprano sax
Alexander Hawkins - Hammond B3 Organ
John Edwards - Double Bass
Steve Noble - Drums and Percussion

More than one other review of this album has described the music in terms of levitation or roof-raising. I can only second that, and emphasise that lift-off is attained within the first few minutes of a set that scrapes in just seconds shy of an hour and twenty. Guest saxophonist Joe McPhee makes his initial, fast flurries over a Hammond shimmer that Alexander Hawkins launched over a percussive surge by Steve Noble, with everything rooted by sinuous bowing from bassist John Edwards. The remaining 76 minutes offer a succession of exchanges spun from an often subliminal, yet solidly embedded pulse. The band manages a superb ebb-and-flow of dynamically contrasting set-pieces. By the eighth minute, for instance, that initial surge has ceded to a knotty solo by Edwards that first invites Noble to tussle and then McPhee too to flex his muscles with a sinewy soprano solo. Another eight minutes in and exploratory forays by Hawkins have created a fresh surge of power dynamics. Tender moments of respite and passages of knotty free jazz alike are quickly made substantial and then just as quickly modulated and recast into something quite different. There’s not one slack moment.

I should declare up-front that I was present at Café Oto in Dalston, North London, on the night in December 2009 when this performance was recorded. The venue is very much home territory for the individual members of Decoy, with Noble and Edwards playing there on a weekly basis. McPhee was in town for just a handful of dates, and he and the Decoy trio had never played together before this date. The standards set at Oto are consistently high, and since I live nearby I could become blasé about what, for anyone new to the music might be epiphanic events, but I knew this night was special when that powerful opening surge was so quickly harnessed and re-moulded, its energies re-purposed.

The first of the three pieces captured has been well named. “Opening Might” clocks in at a daunting 39:53. It’s a masterclass in high-energy improvisation. In the following, half-hour long “Breakout” the quartet continue the evolution of a collective sound, taking things further out while expanding the breadth of their newly minted dynamics. Its conclusion attains, particularly thanks to some lovely playing by McPhee, an extraordinarily plangency that evokes - without imitating - the spiritual mood of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”. At 8:42 the set-closing “Dancing on the Wolf Road” is a gallop to the finishing line, with McPhee worrying away at a repeating motif with extrapolations from Hawkins, both of them riding high under Noble’s percussive bounce. Although Hawkins’ Hammond B3 by no means takes the lion’s share of the limelight, and the gravitas of McPhee’s sax adds vital grist to Decoys’ milling, it does give the music much of its character. On it he ranges from deep, fuzzy whorls of sound that exploit the organ’s rotary speaker effect to passages of extraordinarily fleet dexterity in the instrument’s upper register. The former approach inescapably evokes the instrument’s rich heritage, but the latter emphasises Hawkin’s own distinctive conception.

The recording and mixing is excellent. Edwards’ double bass, an instrument often misplaced in live mixes, is captured in its full woody resonance. I haven’t mentioned him much so far but his playing here is exceptional, exploiting the full range of his technique while always closely meshed into the quartet’s collective identity. Noble, as usual, uses a range of extraneous objects to enhance his standard kit. Sometimes this can be to the detriment of a set’s continuity, but here all his choices are absolutely on the money. His solo thirty minutes into “Opening Might “comes as a well-timed palate cleanser, and it’s marvellous how his established partners Edwards and Noble prod and probe their way in to open things up again. McPhee is the perfect compliment to the established trio. His tone modulates from a harsh throaty wailing to concise, incisive lyricism, and he is just as authoritative in either mode. I’ve not heard him in any other context that demonstrates just how sharp and perceptive he can be. Witness how patiently he listens to the evolution of the bass/percussion exchange at the heart of “Breakout”, before coaxing it into a shape onto which he can impose first a melodic impulse and then a solo of authoritative gravitas. All three players are assertive and selfless by turn. Everyone’s breaks seem to come naturally and there are no bruised feet or egos, no two ideas are apparently ever at odds.

It’s not in the way of things, given the teeming networking of the free music community, for projects such as this to last for long, but McPhee’s involvement in the Two Bands and a Legend project challenges that pessimistic expectation. This could be an awesome proposition as a long-running concern, though they’d have to excel themselves to top this.

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