This is the debut release for a remarkable document of a remarkable band, complete with cover art by the great drummer and jazz iconoclast Tony Oxley, who died last last year aged 85. It was recorded at the Ruhr Jazz Festival in Bochum, Germany in October 1992 and produced by John Corbett, with mastering by Larry Stabbins – who played sax on the date.
Oxley’s composition ‘Angular Apron’, which began its life in the early 1970s and was repeated at intervals throughout his career, represented a kind of midpoint between avant-garde composition and spirited free playing from whoever happened to be in the band at the time. This aggregation, who evidently never appeared together again, was a particularly inspired collection of players. Each brought something unique to the table, although in keeping with the governing context of group improvisation, it’s the overall ensemble which is the most notable element. But what a band: free-jazz veteran Manfred Schoof plays trumpet and flugelhorn, U.S. expatriate Sirone (Norris Jones) plays bass; Larry Stabbins – of both Working Week and the Peter Brotzmann Group – is on soprano and tenor saxophones, with the relative newcomer Pat Thomas on piano. Oxley, of course, plays his characteristic drum-kit mixing various percussive bits and bobs, leading his troop of equals from, as it were, the rear.
The piece is presented as one long track and it goes through several distinct movements, which also correspond to the various combination of solos, duets, trios and ensemble improvisations. Pat Thomas opens proceedings with a literal bang: a splintered keyboard arpeggio that sounds like a case of knives falling to the floor, setting up a formidable sonic challenge for what follows. Thereafter, a series of exchanges between the players – Thomas and Oxley, say, then Thomas, Oxley and Schoof, and so on – takes the music forward. Despite some very stormy sequences, with a fair bit of storm und drang, the music remains as measured-sounding as it is free-spirited. There is a constant sense of discipline and structure to the way the hour-long piece unwinds, with astonishingly little self-indulgence from the players, a testament to Oxley’s commanding presence as bandleader and composer.
All the musicians impose their identities, but Larry Stabbins is a marvel throughout, with a clearly communicated range of saxophone voicings from delicate soprano doodles to heavy tenor squalls. The excellent recording is also an important reminder of what an impressive figure Pat Thomas, who is credited with electronics as well as piano, has been and continues to become. And Tony Oxley, whose widow Tutta Oxley is thanked on the sleeve, sounds – superbly – himself.
