London managed to offer up a couple of musical gems to save us from the sea of shite that, as usual, marked out the festive period. Pushing against the tide of nauseating Christmas music was Dalston’s Cafe Oto, a venue that has spent the last year putting contemporary jazz, the free improvisation scene and other less popular music very much back in fashion. Oto’s Christmas party centred around the Academy Quintet’s raucous deconstructions of Christmas carols, primarily concerned with descents into aggressive bursts of free improv and winding passages of timbral manipulation, before giving us something vaguely approaching a Christmas song. I don’t think I will ever experience a more harrowing ‘Good King Wenceslas’, complete with dense tone clusters and furious flute solos. The savaging of carols paused only to allow brief appearances by Miss Dora Prawnshoe – claiming to be a legendary music hall star – to sing the odd song about oysters and ladies of the night. This was a comic musical marriage – and one that highlighted the Dalston free jazz scene’s ability to leave the highbrow sensibilities of Evan Parker (and other such stalwarts), and instead produce moments aimed at non-converts that fuse humorous accessibility with a convincing case for the merits of free improv.
The evening was bookended by performances from the London Snorkelling Team, a group of players that laid down a false sense of security with a twee sound world. Their music incorporated outbursts of dissonance with continuous improvising around a set of live overhead projections of hand-drawn cartoons, as well as a solo from Leafcutter John of Polar Bear fame, introducing a period of transcendental ambience to proceedings. You would be hard pressed to find a worthier music venue than Cafe Oto, which has now established itself as a much needed counter to the various wannabe Shoreditch nights that claim to offer experimental musical creations (whilst more often than not merely serving as a place for idiots to stand around wearing correspondent shoes and gargling overpriced wine). Over the next few months Oto will play host to legendary German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and bassist Barry Guy among others. Don’t miss out.
I headed back to more conventional territory with the Southbank Centre’s New Year’s Eve party presided over by their artists in residence, contemporary folk band Bellowhead, whose album Hedonism was surely one of the big sounds of last year. Having survived the Christmas-related musical bile that spews out of the Southbank almost continuously during this period, Bellowhead’s three sets were a welcome relief. Following a dance set and various cover versions whilst parading around in circus regalia, the band came hurtling into the third post-fireworks set with unmatchable intensity. Whilst their album Hedonism may have declined to take as many risks as their earlier 2006 offering, Burlesque, such considerations can be set aside in live performance. Their ability to fill the Southbank’s Clore Ballroom with a genre-defying festival dynamic was impressive in itself. Jon Boden’s fiddle playing conducted the endless stream of crescendos and perpetual peaks and troughs whilst in ‘Frog’s Legs and Dragon’s Teeth’ ripped through a demented solo, playing with the darkest timbres and flurried layers of sound. Meanwhile ‘New York Girls’ looks set to fast become a party favourite. This willingness to meld a festival sound with the intellectual considerations of Bellowhead’s early beginnings in folk duo Spiers and Boden makes for compelling listening. 2011 will be an interesting year to watch whether Bellowhead’s listenable experimentation can continue to occupy the ground between the relative fringes of popular music, and a more mainstream position.
