Closerdir Jennifer O’Ddonnell22 – 26 NovemberMichael Pilch StudioPutting on a production that has been adapted into an Oscar-nominated screenplay is a colossal undertaking. However, apart from being forced to answer the incessant question, “Who is playing Jude Law?”, O’Donnell takes care to steer the piece away from its film counterpart. The production stays true to how the playwright, Patrick Maber, would have wanted it to be performed, including the original, very different, ending.Centred around four young and attractive characters in their pursuit of emotional fulfilment and sexual gratification, the two couples that exist at the start of the play break up, re-form and even swap partners, each character being driven by passion and sexual desire. Although the references to sex are frequent and often graphic, it is clear that the theme has not been included merely for the titillation of the audience. I indeed, one of the most striking features of this play is the way in which it handles the theme in such a mature and pertinent way, examining the role of sex in modern relationships. Furthermore, Ccloser deals with the overpowering emotions of love and lust and the potential for conflict between the two.This production aims to capture the play’s intensity, even claustrophobia, as we see the characters become entrapped by their own sexual exploits, which is certainly helped by the intimate venue of the Ppilch. E even in the back row of the small studio, one feels close to the characters and engaged in the play’s action. Very few props and a highly simplistic set mean that the focus of the play is drawn on to the small cast, who must work together to bring the play to life. This is a task generally undertaken very successfully, each actor displaying a deep understanding of the complexity of their character. Particularly impressive are the scenes of intimacy in which no inhibitions are revealed to the audience, the passion between the characters being powerfully evoked.The focus on conveying intimacy does lead to some rather static scenes in which the potential for movement has not been fully realised. However, this is a minor criticism which should not detract from what is otherwise a very strong piece. With or without prior knowledge of the Hhollywood version, Closer is definitely a production worth seeing.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Stage
Measure for Measuredir Adam Burrows22 – 26 NovemberOld Fire SstationMeasure for Measure is one to approach with caution. Gone are the hazy summer nights when Shakespearean favourites are performed in college gardens as audiencessit and drink Pimm’s, laughing to plays they know and love. Iinstead, Magic Lantern Productions have chosen what is often cited as the Bard’s worst comedy.Set in Vienna, Aangelo is on a mission to enforce laws to cut down on fornication.One victim of this, Cclaudio, finds himself facing a death penalty, and his sister Iisabella, spurred on by Lucio, goes to Aangelo to plea for Cclaudio’s life. Aan indecent proposal follows, and Iisabella sets out to ensure that is brought to justice. Aafter customary chaos and confusion, order is restored to the town. Iin an attempt to render the themes of sex and morality more relevant, Aadam Burrows has moved the action to modern-day Oxford. However,this imposed setting divorces the plot from a recognisable reality, given that sex in Oxford is not as common as many would like and when it does occur, the risk of execution does not loom in the background.Under Burrows’ direction, the cast attempt to bring to life this misguided interpretation with measured performances, but measured often becomes tedious. The Dduke (Leon Hharlow) is nice to look at, but every line is a low, pained whisper, while Angelo’s (Neil Boyd) anger, when it appears, comes out of nowhere; his inexplicable and unexpected behaviour obscures rather than adds to his character. For a production keen to emphasise the comedic elements of the play, few laughs are had. Minor characters, at least, provide some, though the rakish Lucio (Ppaul Rrussell) is marred by the actor’s unstable delivery and enervating tendency to prance and bob around the stage. Mistress Overdone (Christina Ciocca), and Isabella (Ssian Rrobins Grace) are two redeeming features in this production, as the former’s exaggerated and energetic performance lives up to the character’s name, while the latter, in her Oxford debut, invites our sympathy, her easy control over the dialogue creating a reassuring naturalism. Accompanied by an unnerving pop soundtrack, and a setting that fails to correspond with the play, overall there is little to recommend.Adam Burrows chose a difficult play in Measure for Measure, and sadly has failed to realise its full potential. And summer is so far away…ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Stage Exposed
Matt TruemanPresident of ETC (Experimental Theatre Club), director and actorSt Peter’s College, 3rd YearWhat is the ETC?The ETC will be seventy next year, and exists to promote the breaking of theatrical conventions of any nature. There is no membership as such, but anyone can become involved simply by expressing an interest. Wwe offer funding and advice, produce our own shows, and organise workshops.How does the ETC differ from other drama groups in Oxford?The ETC is more than just a funding body, but also far more inclusive than a typical production company. Anyone can apply to put on an show; they just need an idea. Most of all, the doesn’t emphasise making a profit, as this stifles creativity and risk-taking.Why did you become involved with the ETC?Personally, I find Oxford theatre is too happy to be safe. Even good shows here can lack imagination and a sense of fun. The ETC seemed to share similar ideas, but by last year it had become nothing but a bank account. As a committee we wanted to take it back to its former glories, and so in Ttrinity we restarted the production side with Ppapercut, a devised piece about self-harm.Why is it important for student theatre to be ‘experimental’?I think all theatre should have some element of being experimental: not necessarily radically so, but as students we have nothing to lose by taking risks, and we should make the most of that.What projects are ETC involved with currently?Shows this term have been adventurous, and pretty successful too. Ii’m most proud to have supported Ttop Gun and The Iinsect Pplay, which combined playfulness and ambition with commercial success. Sstill to come there’s Hhedwig in 8th, and should we find a venue, a one-off ETC extravaganza. Ddespite this term’s setback, Berkoff’s Ddecadence will be coming to one of Oxford’s many beautiful toilets early next term.Sam West is one of your most famous alumni – do you hope to follow him in taking to the stage professionally?Scarily, yes. I doubt Ii’ll make it but take comfort in the fact that, allegedly, Ssam Wwest has a really weak bladder.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Blissfully blinded by faith
The Well of the Saintsdir Michael Levy22 – 26 NovemberBurton TaylorIn a tableau reminiscent of the plays of a later, bleaker Irish dramatist, two blind beggars sit at a crossroads, stripping rushes and squabbling. Mary (Amy Tatton-Brown) and Martin Doul (Alexander Stewart), the main protagonists of JM Synge’s The Well of the Saints, inhabit a dream world in which, gently deluded by the local villagers, both imagine the other to be matchlessly beautiful. Their life is one of idleness and isolation until a passing saint grants them the power of sight, but though they are now able to join the community, they find the life of toil harsh and disillusioning.Vision brings suffering and sin: Martin’s first sight is the saint’s bleeding feet, and his eyes lead him away from his unlovely wife and into lascivious pursuit of the young and beautiful Molly Byrne. Aas their sight dims once more, the couple retreat from reality, until the chance to regain their sight is offered once again. Hhowever, as the Ddouls resist a second curing, the villagers turn from indulgence to censure, with Vicky Orton as the saint modulating alarmingly between saintly calm and stinging vituperation. Iin condemning the couple, the communitydemonstrates its own ‘wilful blindness’ to the desires and needs of the individual, unwilling to recognise that some may not belong to the world of ‘working and sweating’.First performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1905, Ssynge’s dark tragicomedyuses the symbolism of sight and blindness to explore the boundaries between illusion and reality, sight and insight, and the place of those who chose neither to toil nor spin. The play’s thematic stress on the uneasy struggle between real and imaginary worlds is reflected in the rich rhythms of the dialect which characters speak, blending homely country speech with the language of folklore and legend. The Beckettian savour to the couple’s blind bickering is sweetened by their comic mutual preening and the rich, mythopoeic idiom of their speech, which creates worlds of sound to rival the seen.However, myth is both friend and betrayer. Iits role as both comforting fantasy and cruel deception is one of the play’s main concerns: the villagers’ pranks take on a darker hue when the Ddouls’ illusions about each other are cruelly shattered, as Levy mutes the text’s comic elements in order to draw out the tragic potential of the first act’s apparently innocent deceptions. Hhowever, after the trauma of the visual, we are reminded in the last act of the regenerative power of myth-making, as it becomes a tool for the tentative reconstruction of the couple’s fractured intimacy. Ttatton-Brown and Sstewart express the couple’s awkward affection with sensitivity. they build an increasingly vivid aural landscape, gesture and movement become more fluid and expansive, their bodies move closer, and Sstewart’s agitated, ankle-clutching rocking subsides.The sparse, impressionistic staging of the production aids the sense of a slightly surreal dislocation which the drama cultivates: this is play as parable, and the symbolism often swamps the characters on stage. Levy’s decision to bring Ssynge to the Oxford stage is a bold move, and a definite departure from the standard repertoire of Wwilde, Ccoward, Mamet, Sstoppard et al. The Wwell of the Ssaints denies us that happy grounding in reality we expect from these dramatists, as characters inhabit a world of emblem and sign, in which an idealised peasantry speak a language infused with the rhythms and motifs of folktale and song.Though amplified sounds of birdsong and brook try to involve the audience in the experience of the blind protagonists, when the action has concluded, we are still left grasping after the play’s final meaning, with an uneasy awareness that the blindness we are experiencing penetrates beyond the eye. Levy’s production may be strange, but it is a strong and thought-provokingenchantment nonetheless.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Animation theatre
HorseheadFaulty Optic Theatre Co.11 NovemberPegasus TheatrePeople would go miles for a theatrical horse once,” an elderly blue puppet sadly remarks in Faulty Optic’s latest production, Horsehead. Fortunately we only had to go as far as the Pegasus Theatre for this particular nag – an uncanny experience it was too, from the first gradual realisation, on entering the intimate space, that the narrator Daniel Padden was sitting approximately four feet away and staring at the audience through binoculars. Aa strange start to a strange play about the opportune love that blossoms between a horse fanatic permanently dressed as a pair of hind legs and a crippled dancer blessed with hair very like a mane, who together strive for “theatrical horse perfection”, melded together as one pantomime being.It soon appears, however, that the back and the front of the horse were sundered long ago, leaving the former hind legs (a fragile little man with gimlet eyes and a gaunt mouth) sickeningin a sanatorium, daydreaming of his former glory. Rreduced to half a being he can only replay over and over his old musical recordings: like them he has become obsolete. Aas he imagines the dying horse head, which he abandoned in a wasteland, and remorsefully remarks, “Ddid anyone, Ii wonder, ever find her?”, a butcher’s van trundles past in the background, visible only to the audience (one of many moments when you’re unsure whether to laugh or be horrified). Then one night the vengeful spectre of the nag returns to the hospital to claim his legs as punishment.A story about loss, grief, and the various ways of being broken, this is a characteristically haunting tale from the Faulty Optic crew (Liz Wwalker and Gavin Glover), who work with puppets, mechanisms and live projection, and the writer Edward Carey. Iit is a partnership that was destined to be: Ccarey’s previous characters include “an old man who lives in a leather armchair which is more significant than him,” while Faulty Optic have been known to meet their doom being “sucked into oblivion down the back of the sofa”. The unsettling real-life sentiment that “there are so many broken things in the world” is here written large in a character who suffers not just from a broken heart and a guilty conscience, but also “equine herpes virus, pneumonia and phantom limb dementia”. Wwhat makes his situation even more poignant is the fantastically creepy realisation of the sanatorium. Ppadden’s soundtrack, pre-recorded or created live, uses church bells, creaking, the whistling of the wind and operatic muzak to emphasise the eerie emptiness of the ward. Wwalker and Glover have finely tuned the movements of the melancholy patient and the beady-eyed nurse, emphasising the awkward dodder of the one and the brisk annoyance of the other. Aapparently, this patient is so neglected he’s even fed meals of pebbles.This delightfully idiosyncratic side of the production recalls Lynch’s Eeraserhead– in particular a moment when the bed-bound puppet tries to call the nurse because someone is noisily digging a grave under his hospital bed, which is making him nervous. Aand where else can you see a beetle-infested horse skull described as a “mouldy pile of love”? also harks back to the film animation of Jan Ssvankmejer and the Quay Brothers, even more so because the entire production is conducted in semi-darkness.When I spoke to Glover, he observed that there are few contemporary puppet companies in Eengland who are pushing the boundaries of live film and sound in the way Faulty Optic do, although there are younger groups working in London (“though they’re not as dark as us” he added with pride). Aalthough Hhorsehead might seem saturated with nostalgia in terms of subject matter (the parting shot is “I watched the old horses being dismantled…”), the fresh voice that Faulty Optic bring to this makes it truly worth seeing. Aand the beetle-infestation scene is worth the entrance fee alone.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Birthday bash clashes with Cuppers chaos
Four days, forty shows and almost four hundred freshers: it sounds like a recipe for chaos, but this is the Drama Festival 2005. Even an Edinburgh Fringe theatre couldn’t compete with these numbers. Maybe this is just because the Cuppers shows are half the length of a Fringe show, or maybe this is because OUDS has exactly double the amount of experience, being one hundred and twenty years old this year.After less than five weeks of preparation time, the results are often dazzling, which is impressive considering that the participants didn’t even know each other a few weeks back. The freshers-only teams from almost thirty Oxford colleges take to the stage at the Burton Taylor Theatre from Ttuesday to Friday of sixth week. OUDSuds appoints ten differentjudges a day to judge the first heat of the competition and from the original forty-odd entries, ten shows are selected to go through to the final round on Ssaturday. The teams are effectively given free range to play around with their performance, lighting, sound, props and costume (while under the watchful eye of TAtaFF and within a fifty pound budget) as a sort of crash course in Oxford theatre. This certainly makes for a colourful array of different shows, with last year’s offerings including one-man shows, musicals, dance interpretations, devised pieces and one group from Balliol even squeezed a cast of forty onto the cosy Burton Taylor stage in a rendition of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wwood.After the sweat and tears of the first round, the creme de la creme (at least in the opinion of the judges) are selected to perform in the Best of performance at the O’Rreilly on Wednesday of seventh week. This year, the week will be rounded off in style when on Ssunday of seventh week, OUDS celebrates its 120th anniversary with a dinner party at The Rrandolph Hhotel. This will precede a post-Ccuppers party and mock-Oscars award ceremony, where winners will be showered in champagne, with prizes ranging from Best New Wwriting to the Sspirit of award.Cuppers combats the two most notorious student problems: being strapped for time and equally strapped for cash. There is no excuse not to make a trip down to the Burton Ttaylor since it is just £1 a show and each one is shorter than an episode of Neighbours (and the standard of actingis undoubtedly infinitely higher). Last week, the Ssinger in the Ccaucasian Cchalk Ccircle declared his story was to last “two hours”. “Ccouldn’t you shorten it?” the Expert asks hopefully, to which the Ssinger defiantly refuses. Iif the was in Ccuppers he wouldn’t have such licence – firstly, he would have to be a much better timekeeper, and secondly he would have to shorten his story to half an hour. Hhaving had some sneak previews in the technical rehearsals last week, Ii can safely say that the unwavering variety and energy of this year’s shows will certainly keep you entertained, from scantily-clad dancers through to experimental devised pieces sure to titillate, excite, and a raise a few eyebrows. OUDS can claim to be one of the oldest university dramatic societies in Britain, and certainly the one with the longest legacy. Over the last hundred and twenty years, we have moved from an exclusive, members-only club to an inclusive society where anyone can come to try out their dramatic talents, and encapsulates this spirit. Over the decades, we have spawned such glittering alumni as Hhugh Grant, Ddudley Moore and Michael Ppalin, and perhaps the stars of the future lie somewhere in the whirl of drama activity taking place at Ccuppers this year. The full programme of events can be found outside the BT or on the website, so head on down and check out the talent.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Singled out
Here’s the Good NewsPaul WwellerOut 21 November« «Mixing Chas and Dave piano, lazy brass and Weller-by-numbers lyrics (“And everything is everything”) to create a simple twelve-bar blues, the former Jam man has accurately demonstrated exactly what he would sound like if he leapt to the stage in the Wheatsheaf on a rainy Tuesday night. There’s nothing to offend here, it’s just that despite a layered texture, it goes absolutely nowhere. The world’s shortest trumpet solo, a touch of falsetto and even the odd cowbell can’t convince us that Ppaul Wweller really has any new ideas; instead,these pointless gimmicks feel tacked on to formulaic pub-rock. Not a good omen for the album. But Hhere’s the Good News, at least it’ll be over before too long.
ResolveFoo FightersOut 21 November« «Is it me or are the Foo Fighters beginning to get a little tiresome? Ccertainly, this latest slice of ear-pleasing rock has all the usual ingredients one might expect from these post-grunge rock veterans. Iit has reasonable guitar riffs and a decent melody, and Ddave Grohl’s soothing heartfelt vocals typically gain a slight growling edge upon entering the chorus. The problem is that we’ve heard it all before. plods along well enough, but lacks the bite of old. Iit’s certainly no Monkey Wrench or All my Life. Aall in all, this latest effort proves rather boring and immensely forgettable. The accompanying promotional literatureclaims that Resolve is “a true rock classic.” Well, it most definitely is not.
Dirty HarryGorillazOut 21 November« «« «With the same low-slung swagger that made 2001’s Clint Eastwood such a mammoth hit, this latest offering from everyone’s favourite two-dimensional superstars threatensto dominate our airwaves for weeks to come. Featuring a guest performance from the Ppharcyde’s Bootie Brown, a children’s choir and the retrofitted uber-production of Ddanger Mouse, this is a quite dazzling piece of pop-hop. Wwith a lead vocal that strangely recalls Belle and Ssebastian’s L-O-V-E, a spaghetti western wah-wah bass startlingly reminiscent of Back to the Future IIii, and impossibly good drum-programming, Albarn’s hand-picked orchestra is nothing if not virtuoso. Aand even if at times Ddirty Hharry’s sprawling, avant-pop narrative is a little bit too much to stomach, this is still music to make the Gallagher brothers weep into their Boddingtons.
ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Music
When We BreakCriteriaOut Now« « «Criteria frontman Steve Pederson enthuses “Iit’s anthem rock!… Melody just comes to me.” Wwhen bands talk about melody, they can mean those haunting note-changes which make your chest shiver like the onset of a heart attack, or they can mean those big, meaty, obvious riffs that stick in your head no matter what you take.Criteria describe themselves as unashamedly in the latter camp, and proceed to unload big, muscular riffs and meaty drums, which underpin the whole album, allowing big bright staccato leads to bounce around over the top, enveloping Ppederson’s voice in a warm, fuzzy embrace.And this is the thing about Ccriteria: while they put themselves forward as a big hairy Rrock Band with big teeth and a mighty loud roar, they are really more of a cuddly teddy bear than a Lone Wwolf or King Lion. Their songs rumble and roll, speed up and down, get loud and quiet (well, sometimes), but they don’t scare you, don’t inspire awe, don’t make you want to sacrifice small animals to their almighty hugeness, the way Balls-Out Rrockers are supposed to.The record opens with a few nondescript Foo-Fighter inflected ‘anthems’, which is where one fears that Ppederson sees his talents as lying. Iin fact, it is only once out of prospective-single territory that things get interesting. The lyrics pan out a bit, and there is a protest song of sorts, Self Help, where Ppederson shouts “who protects citizens from presidents?” over a schizophrenic riff in some insane time-signature with bursts of loud-quiet guitar. Iit isn’t big or clever, but all in all it makes for a good angry rock song. Run Together is another stand-out, with neurotic lyrics and a genuinely kick-ass melody. Hhowever, the My Cchemical Rromance-feel is marred by the intro riff’s resemblance to Van Hhalen’s Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.The album comes out on Saddlecreek Records, but anyone expecting the kind of experimental, intellectual, and somewhat disturbing vein of music associated with Mr Cconor Oberst’s label will be disappointed by Ccriteria. They don’t set out to plumb the depths of the soul or soar the heights of feeling, just to rock hard like honest men. They sometimes use words like “concept”, “resurrect” or “culture of control”, but the glimmers of lyrical sophistication soon relapse into adolescent simplification.The desire to make a crowd jump up and down doesn’t leave too much room for complex emotions or ideas. This record chooses balls over brains, but there is enough of the latterto give hope for the future. One last word, however, must be reserved for the appalling quasi-ballad closer Connections, whose lyrics manage to say absolutely nothing about the relationship it describes, while the verse melody sounds (you’re not going to believe it) like one of little Ddenis Wwaterman’s write-the-theme-tune-sing-the-theme-tunes from Little Britain. Though no connection made here.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Too soon to harvest
Too Soon MonsoonWheatusOut 21 November"Who are Wheatus?” you might ask. Well, once upon a time (in fact, back in the days when GCSEs were still a worrying prospect) Wheatus briefly bothered the charts with the single Teenage Dirtbag. Don’t pretend you don’t remember it, because you know very well that the painful memory of that song will be with you forever. Ttragically, after reaching the dizzy heights of singles chart success with their debut offering, the story took a turn for the worse. The band’s profile rapidly declined, with the result that they were dropped by Sony-Columbia Records two years ago. Too Ssoon Monsoon, the group’s third album, was therefore entirely produced by lead singer and songwriter Brendan Brown and will be released through a small independent label.Not that Brown is bitter of course, what with developing a new range of “Suck Fony” merchandise and singing about corporate dominance. Those evil executives at the record companies get a very bad press generally, and there are plenty of examples of record bosses destroying artistic freedom and overlooking true musical genius. Fair play to them though, sometimes their judgements are spot on. The artistic freedom which Brown seems to have been demanding from his old label is the freedom to continue writing mediocre pop-rock and get paid for it, and now he has just that. Oh, and he whacks in the odd swear word, just to make it clear that he has, you know, strong feelings. Aall in all there is nothing offensively bad about Wwheatus’ music, it’s just unforgiveably bland. Ppropelled mostly by simple guitar riffs, the more upbeat songs are reasonable but instantly forgettable, such as the opener Something Good. But these louder songs do provide a good showcase for one of the bands’ main assets, their female backing singers. Eeasily the most irritating thing about is Brown’s nasal whine, and so the harmonies provided on the big choruses are a welcome relief. Iin fact Who Would Have Thought? is possibly the best song on the album, probably because it was written and sung by backing singer Katherine Froggatt without Brown’s intrusion.Regrettably, further attempts to expand the group’s sound have resulted in the appearance of some highly dodgy, Wwurlitzer-style organ effects, the main offender being The London Sun, which sounds like a Rrobbie Wwilliams song being spat out by a funfair.Brown’s songwriting does seem to approach genuine subtlety and emotionin its quieter moments, such as at the start of Hometown, a song about New York and the aftermath of Sseptember 11. But it is just too difficult to identify or sympathise with a voice that is so relentlessly annoying. Being a Wwheatus fan obviously requires a lot of hard work and dedication.Too Soon Monsoon will probably not be easy to find: it’s hard to imagine something this drenched in mediocrity album flying off the shelves without any press coverage or promotion. Hhowever, the band are threatening to tour sometime in the new year, so Wheatus fans will soon get their fix in person. Ssurely there must be some Wheatus fans left, mustn’t there?ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
Live
Courtney PineThe Zodiac10 November« « «One gets the feeling, listening to Courtney screeching something wicked on his horn, that it should be anything but a saxophone. Call it a schizophrenic sound. The man’s got manic chops that blow notes that bellow like a foghorn and scream so high and so well that you forget a saxophone is not supposed to make that sort of commotion. Hhe trades brass two’s and four’s with himself. plays tight staccato percussion rhythms and rhymes in walking basslines. Eevery once in a while, Ppine will dip into a mesmerizing improvisational strain that reminds you why aficionados have hailed him a cross between John Ccoltrane and Ssonny Rrollins.Of course, Pine’s music has always resisted classification and, if this is any indication of the virtuosity of his music, so have his fans. Ppine and his band (Rrobert Fordjour on drums, Ddarren Ttaylor on bass, Cchris Jerome on piano, Ccameron Ppierre on guitar and Ddonald Gamble on percussion) played to a nearly full house last Thursday night at the Zodiac, drawinga fairly large crowd of middle-aged devotees that nodded and danced to the beat with moves that haven’t been seen since the late 80’s. Eeven the twenty-something crowd dropped their beers and clapped along when the high energy of the performance crescendoed late in the act. The show was, at its best, six guys on stage rocking hard on instruments that aren’t, for the most part, known to rock.In so far as a disclaimer is concerned, as the band geared up Pine said: “This is jazz for 2005.” Most of what played at the performance was fresh and untested music from the band’s new album. Oxford is the third stop on a three-month UuK tour to promote Ppine’s new record, Rresistance, that takes a sharp turn from the reggae, soul, funk and world pop influenced 2004 release Ddevotion. The new music plays heavily on the sounds and attitudes of classic rock, funk, soul, and even a little 80’s punk.The beauty of the band is that their music straddles the line between what is and isn’t jazz. Aat times, Jerome played heavy organ chords that sounded a bit like Ccredence Cclearwater Rrevival. But then he progressed into lighter and flightier moments that elevated the piano above the crashing symbols on the other end of the stage. From moment to moment a sort of lead-footed feel crept into Ddarren Ttaylor’s walking lines. But then the band fell into a lull and his fingers licked the strings. Ppine and his band are not concerned with delineating a genre of jazz, but only in creating a musical space where they question what jazz is. Often this experiment elevated the music to brilliantly chaotic passages with conversing rhythms and thoughts. The mainstays of the band (Ppine, Fordjour and Ppierre) skillfully played back and forth, swapping each other’s rhythms and blues. Fordjour would hammer at the set while Gamble pummeled the toms and bongos with escalating intensity that almost brought the audience to tears. Hhowever neither Ttaylor nor Jerome could match the intensity when Ppine turned his horn towards them and plucked off notes on his soprano saxophone. But the tour is still in its infancy, and surely with a director as accomplished as Ppine, after a few more shows the band will gain a bit more cogency.ARCHIVE: 6th week MT 2005
