N.E.W.
The Vortex, London
14/03/2011

This night should have been the first of two in an anticipated residency by Japanese trumpet player Toshinori Kondo. But the tragic events of recent days in Japan meant that sadly, for reasons unspecified, Kondo was unable to attend. It fell to his guests N.E.W. to step up and host the entire evening.

N.E.W. are a potent free music trio effectively led by electric guitarist Alex Ward, also featuring the stellar tag-team of John Edwards on bass and Steve Noble on drums. As is common practice across the improvised music scene, all involved are equal. Edwards and Noble are vigorously authoritative musicians who show themselves more than willing to adapt their usual modus operandi to suit each gig and playing partner. There are clear distinctions to be made between their playing behind Ward and their work in other contexts, either in Decoy, with Hammond organist Alexander Hawkins, or Obliquity, with saxophonist Alan Wilkinson. The tropes of their individual techniques are by now bred-in-the-bone, and readily identifiable from one performance to the next; they are always a forceful, combustible combination, yet each addition to the duo’s core rhythm unit constitutes a unique compound with its peculiar characteristics and a distinctive dynamic.

Ward seems rather reticent in the opening moments, but he’s just warming up. Incredible as it seems, he was primarily a clarinettist, only taking up the guitar in 2000, at age 26. His style is characterised by, though by no means limited to, extremely rapid clusters of hammer-ons and pull-offs, often right on the pickups, which naturally leads the trio to play fast, forcefully and, more often than not, at considerable volume. He has a genuinely unique sound, with has a fluid grace to match Buckethead at his best and, on occasion, a burred, burnished edge to his sound that evokes in my mind the playing of Marc Ribot. Of course Ward actually ?sounds like’ neither, these are just associations I made from my own recent listening. One influence that’s beyond doubt, however, is that of Derek Bailey. The hugely influential, though utterly inimitable Bailey supported Ward early in his career, and traces of Bailey’s style can be heard in the clear differentiation of Ward’s notes, his gestural economy, and a stylistic discontinuity less extreme than Bailey’s, which nonetheless makes Ward wonderfully responsive, an essential skill in Noble and Edwards’ company.

For much of the evening Edwards concentrated on strong finger work, ripping notes from the fingerboard of his double bass that bodily punched into the interstices of Noble’s drum hits and Ward’s rapid patterning. Edwards maintained a ferocious work rate, which actually meant that he was less aggressive than I’ve experienced him in the past. On drums, Noble had less time for his peripheral kit than usual, keeping up a freestyle momentum on the snare and toms, and at various points locking (albeit freely) into a rock rhythm, laying down something akin to a classic funk breakbeat, or instilling into the trio’s momentum an irresistible sense of swing. The trio converged around numerous such instances with phenomenal alacrity, improvising extemporizations around naggingly familiar tropes, although I’m sure N.E.W. were as good as their name, and that everything was fully improvised. This willingness to explore passages that riff on popular song-forms should by rights make N.E.W. attractive to a crossover audience, but in the final analysis their commitment to the freedom principle probably precludes that. Certainly they deserve far larger audiences than the hardcore who turned and stayed out on this occasion, despite Kondo’s no-show.

For all the free-rock playing out, however, it’s comforting in a way to know that Noble and Edwards, in particular, are improvising from a core skill-set. Noble inevitably found the odd occasion to extend his kit with gongs and small cymbals, either laid onto the skins or even used in place of sticks; and Edwards, as always, found novel and inventive ways to use the bulk of his bass as a resonator, or to insert interludes of emotively evocative bowing amid all that strong-arm note plucking. It’s impossible to second-guess this tag-team, even when they are fully committed to a passage with a particular thrust or flavour, in moments of introspection, or during passages of scalding intensity. In tandem with Ward, they make music of resolved extremes, and it’s the very things that make it so potentially disconcerting that make it so thrilling. It’s a great shame that Toshinori Kondo wasn’t on hand to add his own singular voice to the N.E.W. mix, and I hope the opportunity has only temporarily been deferred.

Ian adds;

The Vortex website reports that Kondo is safe and well but understandably was unable to travel following the recent catastrophic earhquake event in Japan. The Vortex hope to re-schedule his visit later in the year.

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