KIERAN HEBDEN & STEVE REID — Live At The South Bank (with Mats Gustafsson) (review)

KIERAN HEBDEN & STEVE REID — Live At The South Bank (with Mats Gustafsson) album cover Live album · 2011 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
snobb
I believe this trio's member list looks strange enough.

London-born Kieran Hebden started his musical career as a guitarist in the UK post-rock band Fridge. In 1998 he started a solo career (under the name Four Tet) playing keyboards and electronic devices. He made his name on the British scene remixing Radiohead, Aphex Twin, Manic Street Preachers, Explosions In The Sky and Black Sabbath among others. Then he formed an improv duo with American veteran drummer Steve Reid and released four albums.

Drummer Steve Reid - the other collaborator on here - played with Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Sun Ra and James Brown, but in the last few years was in the Heden-Reid duo. Still, before the day of this album's release on April 13, 2010, Reid died in New York of throat cancer.

The Hebden-Reid duo are known for their long electronics plus drumming live improvs during many European jazz fests (and by their four albums), but the participation of a third member on here, Swedish free jazz/improvs sax player Mats Gustafsson, is quite an unexpected turn.

As a result, we have their best ever recording (sadly already posthumous) a modern mixture of very inspired late 60s free jazz and modern heavy electronic layers grounded in the improvisational music of the 21st century.

This long jamming party opens with a hypnotic heavy (almost 20 minutes long) Hebden-Reid duo improv, but Gustafsson starts in right after; anarchic, explosive and punkish in one moment, then a cosmic voice in others. Very soon all the music becomes one hypnotizing orgy of low sax screams, hypnotic drumming and multi-layerd spacey electronic noises. This 2009 performance in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London was recorded without overdubs and fills two-LP albums, but it dosn't last too long for the listener - you just hear one great neo-'krautrock' free jazz fiesta, full of true jazz spirit.

Probably the best album of 2011 in its genre.
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