This striking new quintet sport an ambitious name, and while it’s not stated what it is they are transcending, their debut gig certainly showed that they have a lot to offer.
You’d know that from the personnel, all richly experienced musical high-achievers. Adrian Utley on guitar and Arnie Somogyi on bass – old mates from when both were based in Bristol – are joined by Mark Edwards on keys, Paul Booth’s reeds and master drummer Seb Rochford in a band somewhat influenced by Utley’s early encounters with Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet.
They don’t recreate that sound, but make new music distilling that and a host of other flavours, combining composition, collective improvisation, melody and groove into a soundworld characterised by a relaxed intensity that compels attention.
The matchless rhythm team have a lot to do with that, the Somogyi serving up an irresistible collection of bass figures so solid they seem hewn from stone, until they slowly mutate, while Rochford embroiders them in endlessly interesting ways in that style that somehow combines lightness and weight, apparently effortlessly. Utley and Booth are both story-telling soloists of the first order offering great melodic invention and Edwards underpins the whole affair with keyboard textures that mainly focus on the Rhodes setting on his electric instrument.
This first outing, a single 100-minute set at rare seated gig in Bristol’s inventively grungy Strange Brew club, focussed mainly on the new writing – one imagines the collective improvisation will expand as they clock up more air miles. Tunes went unnamed: this was a wordless performance save for a name check for the band at the close. But aside from one familiar riff whose title my memory refuses to disclose they were, I think, all new, and ranged from near-classical sounding lines to more obvious jazz vehicles. They afforded plenty of room to stretch out, especially for Booth, on tenor and soprano saxes and occasional bass clarinet. In the final half hour, if not actually transcendent, he seemed to ascend to a new level, and delivered some of the best-sounding and most fluently inventive soprano sax playing I’ve heard anywhere.
This warm-up gig is followed by a second date in Brighton on Easter Sunday, leading up to a meeting at Ronnie Scott’s at the end of the month with the Mwandishi sextet’s trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who Utley and Somogyi have both worked with before, and then a recording.
I went along to this one keen, but also slightly wary, thinking: I guess I’ll need to say “the band were superb, so imagine how good they’ll be when combined with a towering figure in the music like Henderson”. As it happens, that is exactly what I now think. But it’s also inescapable that Transcendence are a monster of a band in their own right, and it was a privilege to hear their public debut.
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Brilliant!