Brit Jazz Fest: Led Bib and Phronesis at Ronnie Scott's

Last night found me at Ronnie Scott’s for the second night of their Brit Jazz Fest, a double bill featuring Phronesis and Led Bib. A full – and young - house for these two, very different bands bodes well.

Phronesis are a piano trio, but the dominant voice seems to be Jaspar Holby’s bass. Perhaps taking their lead from other European trios like EST and the Tord Gustavsen trio, they have an energetic yet subtle presence – drummer Mark Guiliana combining the difficult trick of playing softly but with power, at times just swishing the air with his brushes.

Their set was interesting but ultimately their complex music failed to work its magic on me: their use of quirky rhythms and jerky time signatures made the music feel spiky and angular, and I had to concentrate to keep up.

Led Bib were a very different prospect. From the very start, they had me grinning broadly: there is something infectiously fun about their music. Drummer Mark Holub seems to do most of the writing, but they felt very much a unit. An unorthodox line-up – two alto saxophones plus a keyboards, bass and drums rhythm section – they manage to create incredibly funky improvised punk-jazz. Maybe with a touch of heavy metal thrown into the mix, too.

Electric bassist Liran Donin is central to their sound, putting down line after line of danceable bass. Toby McLaren’s keyboards added a lot of flavour - he was getting some great sounds from his treated electric piano, as well as playing the grand piano - whilst Holub’s drums were pushing the whole thing along with a mixture of rock and jazz beats. Over the top the two altoists - Chris Williams and Pete Grogan – were given the space to improvise, sometimes together, chasing each other up and down, and sometimes in vivid, cascading solos.

The whole is like a funkier, danceable version of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, without the really out-there free phases. Watching the quintet, it felt like it shouldn’t work, but actually, it works very, very well. I’m not sure if it would be so good in the comfort of one’s own home – it felt like it needed the live setting – but it works brilliantly live. Now I want to see them somewhere where the audience could dance – that’d be some gig!

Reader's Block

Much has been written about writers’ block; much less about its bastard cousin, reader’s block.

For much of the spring, I suffered from reader’s block. Earlier in the year, I had read prodigiously, ploughing through a batch of Christmas books, voraciously working through Steig Larsson’s “Millenium” trilogy (I liked the characters so much, I was very sad to finish the last book) – I read thousands and thousands of pages.

And then, with the spring, I lost my appetite for books.

I had to give up on two large, weighty paperbacks – Iain Sinclair’s “Downriver” and Luther Blissett’s “Q”. These are the kind of books I expected to enjoy – deep, complex stories. They came well reviewed by people I trust. Life is too short – and there are far too many books – to waste time reading things that I don’t think I’ll enjoy, and I reckoned these would be right up my street.

Alas, no. They are both dense works, and I struggled to wade through them. I tried long journeys; I tried rainy weekends away. In the end, the struggle was just too much, the reward not worth it.

So I read very little. Maybe it was just me, my mood or whatever else was going on at the time. But it seemed pointless to make myself finish these unwieldy volumes.

In the last month, my reading has picked up again: I have read a very interesting (but equally frustrating) analysis of post-punk pop music, Simon Reynold’s “Rip It Up And Start Again”; one of Colin Cotterill’s Laotian coroner series, “Disco for the Departed” (a charming novel, like Alexander McCall Smith with depth); and I’m now reading Gordon Burn’s novelisation of the news, “Born Yesterday” (actually, not so much of a novelisation as a discussion and discursion on the news). All entertaining, lively, and thoughtful.

I’ve no idea if I’m over my reader’s block, but at least I’m enjoying reading again!

***Addendum*** On the back of the couple of comments I've received, I can't help wondering whether my recent absence (or should that be abstinence?) - writer's block of a kind, I guess - from LJ is also coupled with my reader's block. I'll have to think about that...