Sunny Murray (with Tony Bevan, John Edwards and Spring Heel Jack) The Red Rose, London, UK

THE WIRE - DECEMBER 2006

It was hard to say exactly when the veteran free-jazz drummer Sunny Murray’s performance in the back room of this outwardly unassuming Finsbury Park Working Men’s club began. Murray’s current collaborators, the British duo of bassist John Edwards and saxophonist Tony Bevan, were nowhere to be seen when he sauntered on stage to make final adjustments to his kit, and began casually chatting with the front few rows of the sold-out house. Was this part of the show? Were we to ignore him politely, or attempt to engage in conversation? A documentary film-crew circled as Murray, a bear in a flat-cap, took questions from fans, told affectionate stories, and tightened screws. Sunny Murray had started, after a fashion, and most people hadn’t noticed.

Sunny Murray began co-creating what was to become American jazz’s avant-garde outgrowth with Cecil Taylor in the early 60’s. As he told attentive listeners, he’d tried to transpose Coltrane’s approach to the saxophone to the drums, abandoning conventional rhythms for the percussive equivalent of those all-pervading sheets of sound. By the time he’d hooked up with Albert Ayler, recording Spiritual Unity in 1964, the New Thing was in full swing, and Sunny Murray was stoking its engines. It’s clearly something of a coup for Ashley Wales and John Coxon, of Spring Heel Jack, to host to such a significant player at their regular Back In Your Town night, but when Murray reminisces, making final adjustments to his kit, he reminds us that this totemic figure is also just another working musician.

Whatever needed to be done is done, or undone, and Bevan and Edwards stand guard for Sunny’s opening solo. Four minutes of unaccompanied percussion open the toolbox and display the available hardware. Even when Murray’s at his most uncompromising, his skittering cymbals and staccato stickwork still buzz with the snap, crackle and pop of jazz as cabaret, rather than jazz as edifying art. Even his most lengthy improvisations always seem to end with vaudeville rat-a-tat-tat rimshots. After four minutes or so, Edwards dives into the undertow and Bevan shoots a reveille-like tenor salvo across the bows, perhaps an early concession to Albert Ayler’s strangely martial solos, and they’re off. Bevan’s playing initially is compellingly unadorned, and it looks like the night is going to be a heroic battle of wills. But somewhere around the twelve minute mark, Sunny settles into a series of skittering moves that allow the saxophonist to blow more softly, and Edwards to stretch out into a mesh of cyclical pulses, to the drummer’s obvious delight, before Bevan re-energises the piece, improvising around a little phrase that seems to have been copped from Harry Warren’s showtune, The Lullaby Of Broadway. A second shorter improvisation sees Bevan on the bass sax and Murray fluttering the edges of his cymbals over an uncharacteristically inisistent beat.

After the interval, the trio is joined by Wales and Coxon, on electronics and guitar respectively, and what has been a satisfying display of ye olde avant-garde jazz becomes something rather more confusing. The Murray-Edwards-Bevan trio know the rules of their game, but now Coxon’s clanging guitar notes and Wales’ techtonic rumbling have altered the shape of the playing field. They quintet begin cautiously, searching for an elusive centre ground, and Bevan falls back on unusually melodic playing as a counterpoint to the gathering chaos. There’s a feeling of panic, like the players have painted themselves into a corner. Edwards anchors a sustained wall of electronic skree with a walking bassline, and Murray seems lost, but it’s great to watch the group struggle a little, clearly beyond its comfort zone. Bevan pitches some squawky serialist sax over the noise, but the group are still drifting. After a quarter of an hour a strange and beautiful empty space opens up, allowing a considered, almost tidal interplay between the collaborators, until Bevan and Coxon force an escape route, bouncing sustained bursts back and forth between them. As the group finally begin a gradual collective descent, Bevan indulges in more lively, Ayler-style bugle-calls, as Murray plateaus out into a thunderous retreat.

This was the kind of show the London Jazz Festival should have been showcasing, but we witnessed it on a tiny stage more commonly home to up-and-coming stand-up comedians. With Wales and Coxon programming this kind of stuff alongside the existing Free Radicals nights, the genial Irish man who manages the bar at The Red Rose has belatedly become something of a free-jazz connoisseur. Is there any way he can be allowed to replace BBC Radio 3 as the LJF's official sponsor?
Will there be crisps and nuts?

STEWART LEE