Free #3

Description

This music and its exponents defy categorization. The word 'band' doesn't cover it.

Concept; project; workshop; experiment; energy; assembly; community; association. Black Top is all of the above and more, and although the music industry would call the British multi-instrumentalists Orphy Robinson and Pat Thomas a group that is augmented by different guests for their performances there is too much imagination and unpredictability in the results for the term to be really a propos. Black Top is its own thing, or something, or some kinda ting for our times, if one adapts the zeitgeist that the visionary dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has referred to as 'tings an' times'.

Since its genesis in 2011 Black Top has been through significant changes in sound and personnel so that any signature they present is most likely to be soon rewritten. Two previous recordings have seen two great British saxophonists, Steve Williamson and Evan Parker, respectively, each become the third point of the triangle, but on this session it is two stellar American improvisers, drummer Hamid Drake and double bassist William Parker, who join the fluid fraternity. They duly cement a pivotal transatlantic exchange in creative music, a kinship that builds on Robinson's work with such as Lester Bowie in the early part of his career and Thomas's with Butch Morris in his. As much as the four players in this latest incarnation of Black Top represent iconic spaces in the world of western music – London and New York, whence they emerged during the '70s and '80s – they also have non-western common denominators. Thomas and Robinson maintain a deeply rooted interest in Caribbean folk that chimes with Parker's avowed love of calypso – heard in his own bands and in collaborations with Trinidadian-American vocalist Faye Victor – while all three and Drake have immersed themselves in African, Middle Eastern and Asian music.

This vast amount of information permeates and percolates in pieces that fearlessly uphold the principle of spontaneous composition. When the players convened at east London's Café Oto in August 2016 during Black Top's two-day residency there was great expectation over what the meeting would produce, but the extent to which they deeply personalized the myriad vocabularies housed by the word 'jazz' was gripping.

A reprise of Moanin', the anthem forever linked to drum-star pioneer Art Blakey, drops rakish dissonance into the gospel-fired theme to present hard bop and avant-garde as cousins at play rather than brothers in arms, while the 42 minute opus For Joe Harriott investigates the kind of skilful mutation-elaborations synonymous with the Jamaican legend. Yet amid all the fiery disruption there is sensual dance. This is where the ensemble unveils its most boldfaced dynamic range, turning a two-beat tick-tock of marimba into a time-stretch suite whose vigorous rhythmic invention sees clavé, shekere and cabassa phrases swerve around hammer-headed keyboard syncopations. Stark shifts in tempo and attack push the music into both floating freeform and a groove broken free of a 12 bar shackle before Sun Ra's space organ skanks into view and the music fades to black over a tantalizing roots reggae surge.
Histories rather than history are in effect. Traditions rather than tradition are in vivo. Black Top is a laboratory of sound, and in this third offering of its evolutionary trials four audio scientists play with notes and tones as if tomorrow's blues had come today. - Kevin Le Gendre, London, 2017.