“It feels like a celebration to me!” says bassist Alison Rayner of her quintet ARQ’s new album ‘SEMA4’.
As jazz decades go, the 1980s was a pretty good one – not least for the return of Miles Davis from a self-imposed exile, the emergence of the wunderkind Wynton Marsalis, a renaissance for acoustic bebop after its long eclipse by electric jazz, and for the creation of the UK’s Loose Tubes, one of the great modern big bands.
And in its own way a gamechanger too – for both contemporary jazz and entrenched assumptions about who plays it – was the formation of The Guest Stars, an all-female Latin-fusion quintet that made such an impact that their initial reception ranged from the breakfast TV host’s puzzled query ‘what’s the matter, aren’t men good enough for you?’ to a date at New York’s legendary Blue Note jazz club.
A founder member of that pioneering band was Bromley-raised Alison Rayner, a Jaco Pastorius-inspired bass guitarist in those days who turned into a supple and sonorous double bassist with a Charlie Haden-like lyricism, a composer of vivaciously open and songlike themes, and over the past decade the leader of the much-lauded, award-winning, and very eclectic quintet, ARQ (aka the Alison Rayner Quintet). The band releases its fourth album this month, SEMA4. If that sounds like a faintly cryptic title, the music is anything but. Mingling folk-dance vitality, high-energy soloing, ambient spaciness and episodes of poignant tenderness, this nine-track set is as openly and joyously communicative as the group’s music has been for over a decade.
In her Guest Stars years, Alison Rayner blossomed as a composer and instrumentalist who grew accustomed to constant touring and the acclaim of eager audiences all over the UK and across Europe. But it’s through her work and life with ARQ that Rayner seems to most appreciate the gift that all that road-life, jamming and hanging out has brought her – deep musical and personal friendships that span decades, like those that fuel the longevity of the quintet, and notably a relationship with guitarist Deirdre Cartwright that runs from The Guest Stars to this week’s release, alongside the pair’s continuing three-decade partnership running the Blow The Fuse record label and promoting operation.
‘We all go back a long way,’ Alison Rayner says. ‘And that’s been very important to the formation of this band, and the way we play together. When I decided to have my own group, I wanted to have people that I knew well, people I felt might get along. In pop groups, the same people usually play most of the gigs. In jazz, though maybe it’s not so common now as it used to be, the musicians on your album might not always be the same ones playing the gigs. I wanted more consistency so that audiences would get to know us. Long-running jazz groups are hard to sustain, but we’re still here!’
ARQ’s first release, 2014’s August, immediately established what a group of soulmates with receptive tastes bridging all manner of jazz, folk, and Latin-American musics could sound like, since the tracks took in Stanley Clarkish street-grooves, influences from Pat Metheny and Sly Stone to Ernest Ranglin, Cannonball Adderley, free jazz, and plenty more. The follow-ups, A Magic Life (2016) and Short Stories (2019) were similarly acclaimed (Rayner’s ‘There Is a Crack In Everything’ from Short Stories won an Ivor Novello Composer Award), and SEMA4 sustains the band’s signature qualities and builds on them.
The opening ‘Espiritu Libre’ is right in the ARQ ballpark of fast-swapping grooves and muscular improv from guitarist Deirdre Cartwright and the soprano sax of Diane McLoughlin – whose delicate soprano-led meditation ‘Looking for a Quiet Place’ is also one of the set’s highlights – while the snappily hard-boppish ‘Semaphore’, pianist Steve Lodder‘s rhapsodic-to-hard-driving ‘Hamble Horror’ and the north-European ambient feel of Deirdre Cartwright’s dreamy, electronically bleeping ‘Signals from Space’ sustain this versatile ensemble’s reputation for inventive scene-shifting of styles and vibes. Rayner’s ‘Trip Dance’ has a distantly Balkan folksy conviviality, McLoughlin’s ‘Riding the Waves’ and Lodder’s ‘The Handkerchief Tree’ are cinematic personal reflections on impermanence, resolve, and nature’s quirkiness. The finale, Alison Rayner’s beautiful ‘All Will Be Well’ (occasioned by the recent death of her younger sister Fran, to whom this album is dedicated) has a hauntingly pensive horn melody over soft pulsing bass figures and Buster Birch‘s rimshot ticks, swelling to impassioned piano and tenor surges before dropping back to silence, the Vortex audience’s warm reception, and a few departing moments of birdsong.
‘It’s been a strange few years, particularly with the loss of my sister, which was a very big deal,’ Rayner says. ‘The pandemic was also very difficult, as it was for so many people. When we released Short Stories in 2019, we were in the middle of touring it when the lockdowns happened. So we lost half the tour, and though we got the gigs back eventually, it was 18 months later, and we’d all changed a lot by the time we got back to trying to create that music again. Also, though I know some people made very good use of lockdown with remote projects and writing new materials and things, I didn’t, and I was quite low for a while. Then my sister began to get very ill, and I got very demoralised. But making this album has been wonderful, and it feels like a very nice and positive thing again.’
I ask Alison Rayner if that outcome was a surprise since the story goes that the band had never intended to make this release a live recording. She chuckles at the recollection.
‘What we thought would happen in making a recording at the Vortex, a place we feel particularly at home in, was that there might be one or two tracks we could include on the next studio album,’ she says. ‘More like trying them out, you know. It’s always great for feedback to try some new numbers with an audience there. I hadn’t been sure what to expect, but I heard the recording back. I was really pleased with it and felt we had something special because it had a great energy and vibe to it.’
The pieces on SEMA4 seem to be coming from a lot of different places, I suggest to Alison Rayner – idiomatically, and in a way cinematically too.
‘I’m very proud of this album,’ Rayner says. ‘It’s the most collaborative we’ve done in terms of the writing contribution, and it was very nice because I’d been through this drawn-out awful period and trying to get over losing my sister, and I told the others I was really trying to write, but I was finding it difficult. So I said, “have any of you got some ideas?” and very soon, Steve and Diane came up with a piece each, and I had one or two, and it went from there. When we did ‘August’ in 2013, I think I was the only writer, but now different people in the group take the lead at times, bring a piece along, direct it their way if they want, or we can all collaborate on it in our own ways. It’s more than ten years now since our first release, and this feels like the most positive phase we’ve been in since before the pandemic. It feels like a celebration to me!’
ARQ’s new album, SEMA4, is out on 7 March on Blue The Fuse Records in association with ECN Records, and plays the Pizza Express Jazz Club, Soho, on 9 March. The band then tours from 15 March to 10 June.
