Johnny Richards & Dave King

“The New Awkward”

(False Door Records)

Johnny Richards – piano, Dave King – drums

“The New Awkward” is the remarkable debut recording by the Anglo-American duo of pianist and composer Johnny Richards and drummer Dave King.

Richards is a pianist and composer based in Leeds and is a graduate of the city’s Conservatoire. He is a member of the band Shatner’s Bassoon and has collaborated widely with Leeds based guitarist/drummer/sound artist/composer Craig Scott on the latter’s various projects, including the groups Craig Scott’s Gastric Band and Craig Scott’s Lobotomy.

Richards has also worked with musicians such as saxophonist James Mainwaring, of Roller Trio fame, and electronics artist Radek Rudnicki, founder of the band Spacef!ght. Richards also has his own electronics project Felaluigi.

Others with whom he has collaborated include pianist Matthew Bourne, drummer/vocalist Sean Noonan, The Sorcerers, and the Ligeti Quartet.

Richards also works as a solo pianist and frequently incorporates prepared piano techniques into his sound. In 2021 The Jazzmann reviewed his solo album “Build A Friend”, released on the Newcastle based New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings (NEWJAiM) label. This made extensive use of prepared piano to produce music that I described as being “fascinating, adventurous and surprisingly accessible”. The full review, from which much of the above biographical detail has been sourced, can be found here;
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/johnny-richards-build-a-friend

The American drummer and composer Dave King is best known as a member of the hugely successful group The Bad Plus but has also worked with with a host of illustrious collaborators across a broad range of musical genres, ranging from free jazz to avant rock and all points in between. He also leads his own jazz group The Dave King Trucking Company, with which he has released four albums. In total King appears on more than fifty recordings and it’s probably fair to say that this intriguing and enjoyable collaboration with Richards ranks right up there alongside his best work.

“The New Awkward” is very much a product of the lockdown period as Richards explains;
“In the 2020 Covid lockdown Dave started offering online composition / drum lessons, so I signed up to get his insights into my compositions. Me and Dave shared a mutual interest in making complex music – combining improvisation and composition into concise, direct pieces while retaining denseness and complexity”.

The album features Richards’ compositions exclusively and he would record the piano parts, including prepared piano and percussive sounds from within the piano, and send them online for King to drum over. This was a collaboration conceived and realised on two separate continents, made possible by digital technology, and is thus very much a product of its time. It may have been recorded a while ago but its eventual release has been well worth waiting for and the music still sounds fresh and exciting.

Listening to the album one is immediately struck by the fullness of the sound. “The New Awkward” certainly doesn’t sound like the work of just two musicians. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising as Richards had originally written this music with the intention of performing it with a band. “The restriction of being at home and only having my piano informed the instrumentation” he explains, “it made sense to use prepared piano, allowing me to have more ‘voices /  instruments’ than just the piano, creating an ensemble feel while retaining a sense of intimacy”.

He continues;
“Usually there are around four piano layers, either thickening the texture or interweaving to create variation. Throughout the album I use combinations like Blu-Tack bass with normal piano, or screws in the strings. Often there’s one texture in the left hand and another in the right, creating a denser sound”
He also uses a knife to bow the strings.

Richards used similar methods on the earlier solo piano recording “Build A Friend” and my review of that album offers further insights into his prepared piano techniques.

With regard to his compositional process Richards says;
“The written music is mainly counter-point, influenced by Tim Berne, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg and J.S. Bach, with post-minimalist, pointillistic riffs. I treated each contrapuntal voice like a different instrument, altering the sound accordingly. The album is a homage to all that have inspired me from contemporary / experimental jazz, including Dave’s music, and much broader inspirations aesthetically, melody from Radiohead,  the electronic / ambient weirdness of Warp Records and the quirkiness of Frank Zappa and Mr Bungle”.

Other sources of inspiration that have been suggested include Robert Wyatt, Battles, Indonesian Gamelan music and the Belgian avant rock outfit Aksak Maboul.

Album opener “Chance Would Be A Fine Thing” combines a variety of prepared piano sounds with the busy chatter of King’s drums and percussion to mesmerising effect. The two musicians combine to create a lattice of interlocking rhythms, but a sense of melody always remains. This is the “complex music” of which Richards speaks, “concise and direct, while retaining denseness and complexity”. It’s music that baffles and beguiles in almost equal measure.

“Sleepless in Settle” (great title, I wonder if Dave got the joke) combines a wealth of prepared piano sounds with King’s responsive drumming. The supposed restrictions of file sharing and remote recording actually seem to have liberated the duo, allowing them to experiment even more than they might have been able to do face to face in the studio. As previously mentioned the sound is surprisingly full, the dense layering creating consistently fascinating textures and rhythms. This piece combines elements of free jazz with Gamelan, but remains surprisingly accessible – like the opening track it was even released as a single.

“Memory Man” incorporates the use of “Blu-Tack bass’ among other prepared piano techniques. It’s a busy, fidgety track that features driving rhythms, the remote duo creating a remarkable ‘in the moment’ sense of energy. There are ambient / electronic / EDM elements too, particularly in the trance inducing latter stages of the piece.

The album appears on Richards’ own False Door record label, named perhaps for the eerie “False Doors”, which evokes the feeling of drifting, lost at sea “listening to the rumbling clang of buoys”. So says the press release and it’s a description that’s exactly spot on with regard to the atmospheric intro. The mood later becomes more urgent as plucked piano strings combine with the restless bustle of drums and percussion. The album as a whole is intensely rhythmic, with Richards’ techniques exploiting the full capabilities of the piano as a percussive instrument.

The album title is perhaps a play on “The New Normal”, a now largely forgotten phrase / concept that emerged during the pandemic. It’s a sometimes playful piece that combines quirky piano generated sounds with off kilter rhythms in a manner that leads the press release to suggest that the music could be the “soundtrack to some highly involved comic caper”. Indeed one can imagine Richards and King providing the incidental music to a Buster Keaton movie, and doing so in the most imaginative and inventive way possible.

The frenzied “Gene Heard Wrong” delivers on Richards’ promise of “post-minimalist pointillistic riffs” with its urgently bubbling layers of prepared piano sounds combined with King’s skittering percussion.

The brief miniature “Derpa Days” continues the minimalist experiments during the course of a short but spirited vignette.

“Darts” features the sounds of bowed strings and Blu-Tak bass in addition to King’s fidgety drums and percussion. It’s another short-ish piece that is essentially an intriguing cameo.

The more substantial “I Done It” features the duo at the duo at the height of their powers, equal partners in a spellbinding Transatlantic musical conversation featuring mind bogglingly complex rhythms. Intense bursts of animated musical discussion are punctuated by more reflective and impressionistic episodes on one of the album’s stand out tracks.

The album concludes with “Climbing On Mirrors”, generally a more considered exchange of ideas, again featuring a range of piano sounds that the press release refers to as “a luxuriant battery of sonority”, a perfect description for the multiplicity of sounds that the ever inventive and resourceful Richards is capable of generating. King is the perfect partner, responding equally imaginatively from across the Atlantic.

“The New Awkward” is a truly remarkable album, adventurous and restlessly inventive, but also genuinely accessible. It’s an alternative universe, a musical ‘Hall of Mirrors’ throwing the music into distorted shapes, but ones that beguile and fascinate, rather than repel. What really shines through is the duo’s playfulness and sense of fun, for all the avant garde trappings there is nothing po-faced or overly serious about this music and it is genuinely immensely enjoyable to listen to. It must have been even more enjoyable to create.

The range of sounds that the duo, and especially Richards, produce is little short of astonishing and this multi-layered music reveals more and more on each subsequent listening. Credit is also due to engineers Tim Thomas, who recorded Richards’ pianos and acted as his co-producer and ‘right hand man’, and JT Bates who recorded King’s drum parts in the US. Also the financial support of Help Musicians UK and Arts Council England should not be forgotten.

Although this is essentially a duo of equals it’s still tempting to think of Richards as the ‘senior partner’, which is still unusual in an Anglo-American collaboration. The tunes are all his and it’s his imaginative use of a whole range of extended piano techniques that helps to make the album so distinctive. The album is a triumph for Richards, but it’s also one of the best things that King has appeared on.

For me this hugely enjoyable, strangely charming and surprisingly accessible album deserves to reach a wider audience beyond the usual ‘free jazz’ or ‘avant garde’ demographic. Maybe the presence of a ’big name’ like King will help it do just that.

“The New Awkward” is available here;
https://falsedoorrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-new-awkward-2

See also;
https://www.johnnyrichardsmusic.co.uk/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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