Two of the pivotal outfits describing the new jazz sounds of London and Chicago and specifically the artistry of the International Anthem label find themselves at Sunset Tavern and The Neptune Theatre in early September. Gus Fairbairn had his beginnings as Alabaster DePlume in the early 2000s as one of the players around the locus of London's Total Refreshment Centre. The venue enjoyed a recent anthology on the legendary Blue Note, the venerable label capturing "A Complex, Thrilling Moment in a Fast-Expanding Musical Community". The venue and its players are central to the new British jazz scene, as covered in The Guardian's primer to this contemporary body of musicians, "The British Jazz Explosion: Meet the Musicians Rewriting the Rulebook". In the fist of his releases for the International Anthem label, Fairbairn released a gently enveloping suite of instrumentals, "To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol.1". The album stretched over eleven tracks of Fairbairn’s tentative, breathy sax melodies laid over downtempo, atmospheric chord voicings and chamber music compositions. Described in the pages of The Guardian as "The Stress-Busting Jazz of Alabaster DePlume", Fairbairn's latest project, "Gold: Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love", continues and expands upon that emotional ethos and its swooning gently flowing musical surfaces. Recorded over the course of two weeks at Total Refreshment Centre and employing Fairbairn's practice of having different band arrangements playing on each session, the resulting pieces have also been mixed by different producers and employ self-sampling and structural techniques from his prominent label-mate and drummer, Makaya McCraven.
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Alabaster DePlume and Joshua Abram's Natural Information Society at Sunset Tavern & The Neptune Theatre: Sept 6 & 14
Two of the pivotal outfits describing the new jazz sounds of London and Chicago and specifically the artistry of the International Anthem label find themselves at Sunset Tavern and The Neptune Theatre in early September. Gus Fairbairn had his beginnings as Alabaster DePlume in the early 2000s as one of the players around the locus of London's Total Refreshment Centre. The venue enjoyed a recent anthology on the legendary Blue Note, the venerable label capturing "A Complex, Thrilling Moment in a Fast-Expanding Musical Community". The venue and its players are central to the new British jazz scene, as covered in The Guardian's primer to this contemporary body of musicians, "The British Jazz Explosion: Meet the Musicians Rewriting the Rulebook". In the fist of his releases for the International Anthem label, Fairbairn released a gently enveloping suite of instrumentals, "To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol.1". The album stretched over eleven tracks of Fairbairn’s tentative, breathy sax melodies laid over downtempo, atmospheric chord voicings and chamber music compositions. Described in the pages of The Guardian as "The Stress-Busting Jazz of Alabaster DePlume", Fairbairn's latest project, "Gold: Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love", continues and expands upon that emotional ethos and its swooning gently flowing musical surfaces. Recorded over the course of two weeks at Total Refreshment Centre and employing Fairbairn's practice of having different band arrangements playing on each session, the resulting pieces have also been mixed by different producers and employ self-sampling and structural techniques from his prominent label-mate and drummer, Makaya McCraven.