Elliot Galvin Trio

“Punch”

(Edition Records EDN1076)

The young pianist and composer Elliot Galvin is one of the rising stars of the UK jazz scene. Already a highly distinctive and individual musician Galvin’s work with his trio has evoked comparisons with Django Bates and exhibits a wide range of influences spanning the obvious jazz and classical reference points plus Dadaism, Surrealism, film, theatre and music hall. The title of his trio’s début album, “Dreamland”, released in 2014, was inspired by the abandoned amusement park of the same name in Margate in his native Kent. Listening to Galvin’s music it’s a highly appropriate image.

Quirky and darkly humorous “Dreamland” exhibited enormous promise and gave notice that a significant new talent was emerging. Galvin is a musician of enormous technical facility but the most refreshing thing about his playing is the way in which he channels this gift to make music that is daring, fun and genuinely original.

Galvin studied at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of music alongside the trumpeter and composer Laura Jurd and the pair helped to found the Chaos Collective of young musicians, the majority of them Trinity graduates. Galvin is concurrently a member of Jurd’s electro-jazz quartet Dinosaur and has also performed in groups led by the saxophonist and composer Phil Meadows, bassist and composer Huw V. Williams and guitarist Dan Messore.. More recently he has been involved in a freely improvising duo with the vastly experienced drummer Mark Sanders.

But Galvin’s primary artistic outlet remains his trio featuring bassist Tom McCredie and drummer/percussionist Simon Roth. Having previously seen Galvin performing as a pianist with both Meadows and Messore I decided to check out his own trio at a performance at Dempsey’s in Cardiff in September 2015. That show is reviewed elsewhere on this site but nothing had quite prepared me for the Galvin live experience as the leader augmented the venue’s grand piano with a plethora of his own devices including toy piano, kalimba, melodica, stylophone, music box and cassette recorder. Galvin deploys most of these instruments and implements on the new album, plus the accordion that he sometimes plays with Huw V. Williams’ group, Hon.

Galvin’s technical brilliance allied to his impish sense of irreverence made that Cardiff show a highly memorable musical experience. Much of the material to be heard on “Punch” was featured in the set alongside items from the earlier “Dreamland”. In November I was to see the trio perform a very similar set at Ray’s Jazz at Foyle’s as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival and I found myself equally enthralled second time around thanks to the trio’s blend of wit, inventiveness and immense musical skill. The music of the Elliot Galvin Trio is a novelty that shows no signs of wearing thin.

Based as it is around the trio’s live set the music to be heard on “Punch” sounds organic and thoroughly played in. Also, despite the air of mischievousness that pervades much of Galvin’s output, it simultaneously sounds remarkably mature, the music of an artist who has defined his own style.

Of the trio’s music Galvin has said;
“Tom and Simon are two of my favourite musicians to play with. It really does feel like ‘playing’ when it’s with them, in the truest sense of the word. It’s a lot of fun and anything can happen, which I love. Simon brings a massive sonic palette and Tom brings a huge, beautiful sound, and both of them bring something completely unique in their playing”. 

The album begins with “Punch And Judy”, effectively the title track. The first sound that we hear is Galvin manipulating a vintage cassette recorder to produce a kind of ‘real time sampling’. As the mangled voices of the Punch and Judy show fade away the musicians take over with a passage of intense, fiercely interactive interactive trio playing. Eventually the voices return, again manipulated by Galvin who punctuates them with single note stabs at the piano. Galvin is clearly fascinated by the notion that the grotesque acts of violence that pepper the story of Punch were once considered as suitable subject matter for the entertainment of children. You can take the boy out of Margate…

“Hurdy Gurdy” fairly tumbles out of the speakers with its densely clustered piano phrases and busily brushed drum grooves but there’s a very British quirkiness about it that sets it apart from, say, E.S.T. or The Bad Plus. The tune flits quickly between motifs and phrases, it’s the kind of busy music that has helped to evoke the Django Bates comparisons - something emphasised when Galvin introduces his cherished but “battered and out of tune” accordion, which serves as his equivalent to Bates’ distinctive synthesiser sounds.

Tipu’s Tiger” is a piece that was played at both the Cardiff and London performances that I witnessed in 2015. It was inspired by an animated wooden sculpture housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum which depicts a tiger eating British soldier . The macabre artwork was commissioned by the Sultan of Mysore and embodies a dark, anti-colonial sentiment. The sculpture incorporates a pipe organ which simulates the victim’s screams. Galvin wisely avoids attempting to replicate this, instead he deploys both piano and kalimba on this track as Roth tinkles away on glockenspiel, the playful theme instead approximating the sound of a music box. McCredie impresses on both arco and pizzicato bass and his excellent playing adds hugely to the success of the piece. “Tipu’s Tiger” is a masterpiece of dark whimsicality, somehow managing to be both charming and sinister.

“Rolling” is a nine second snippet of studio chatter allied to a fleeting sample of tape recorder noise, suggesting that it’s an out-take from the opener. “A happy find that just demanded to be on the record”, explains Galvin.

“Blop” features Galvin playing his self created microtonal melodica. A self confessed gadget nerd Galvin likes to source his various effects acoustically and organically. There is no electronic sampling here, something that sets Galvin apart from fellow piano maverick Matthew Bourne, another musician with whom he has inevitably been compared. In this instance Galvin purchased two melodicas, glueing them together but first detuning one of them by a quarter-tone – manually. Galvin explains;
“I stayed up all night, opening up one of them and slowly filing down all 36 individual metal reeds inside. I’ve always been a little frustrated that the piano can’t play the notes in between the notes so I built myself a microtonal melodica. I’ve wanted to play some microtonal bebop for a while”.
The piece also features Galvin on stylophone and inevitably sounds nothing like conventional bebop, but nonetheless with its weird and wonderful sounds allied to strong bass and drum grooves it’s still hugely entertaining and terrific fun. Galvin admits that the piece is tongue-in-cheek - “but it’s irony with love” he explains, “I genuinely love bop”. 

There are more unusual sounds on the similarly charming and whimsical “Lions” which features a light, airy prepared piano sound, not dissimilar to pizzicato violin. This was achieved by Galvin covering the strings of the piano in duct tape. McCredie’s muscular but flexible grooves and Roth’s colourful drumming add to the appeal and the piece also features a smattering of arco bass and a brief vocal refrain from McCredie. The title takes inspiration from the fact that there has always been at least one lion living in London since the year 1210! These are the kind of seemingly random factual nuggets that seem to inspire the eccentric, insatiably curious, highly intelligent Galvin.

The album takes a darker turn with “1666”, the sombre theme intended to express something of London’s misery in the face of the Great Plague,  the Great Fire and the Anglo-Dutch war. Galvin’s sparse neoclassical melody is is juxtaposed with some pretty contemporary grooves from McCredie and Roth and the piece possesses an eerie beauty that is all its own.

The only outside material on the album is Galvin’s extraordinary and wholly convincing arrangement of Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife”. Here Galvin and his colleagues reclaim the tune from the supper club crooners and recast the tune in its proper dark setting. Roth picks out the familiar melody on a child’s glockenspiel above Galvin’s doomy, menacing piano chords with McCredie’s occasional use of the bow also adding to the uncomfortable atmosphere. As the piece develops along the lines of a skewed march (echoing the rise of Hitler, and very possibly his modern counterparts) Galvin delivers a solo that embraces a wilful dissonance as the music builds to an almost frightening intensity. Having reached a thunderous climax the piece resolves itself with a reprise of the melody on the glockenspiel, the saccharine tinkling now sounding vaguely threatening and sinister in the wake of what has passed before. It’s perhaps particularly apposite that the album was recorded at the Funkhaus Studios in Berlin with Marco Birkner engineering.

“Polari” takes its title from the coded language used by the suppressed London gay community in the 1950s. The tune itself is something of a romp and features some of the trio’s most vigorous playing as they channel the spirits of Neil Cowley, The Bad Plus and E.S.T. through their own unique prism.

The album concludes with “Cosy”, which Galvin claims to have been inspired by the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life”. It is also a celebration of the Dreamland complex in Margate which was destroyed by a fire in 2008. Galvin was part of a multi media event held at the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate to commemorate the much loved institution that was Dreamland and “Cosy” was originally written for that. The piece includes a simple, Bates like,faux naïve melody which the trio members whistle along to, with live performances also finding Galvin encouraging members of the audience to join in. This bookends the piece but mid tune the trio engage in some rather more rumbustious playing with Galvin again mounting a foray into Neil Cowley inspired territory. Superficially the tune is similar in structure to “A Day In the Life” insofar as being divided into three distinct sections, but that central piano vamp is more “Lady Madonna”.   

“Punch” has garnered excellent reviews and with the weight of the Edition Records distribution arm behind it the album looks set to bring the music of Elliot Galvin and his trio to a wider audience. Galvin’s wilfully eccentric approach won’t be for everybody but even sceptics will find it hard to resist the eclectic joie de vivre of these performances. There’s also the astonishingly high quality of the musicianship to appreciate.

Inevitably the spotlight will fall primarily on the maverick Galvin but the contributions of McCredie and Roth are also superb and add hugely to the success of the music. Perhaps the live environment is the best place to appreciate just how interactive this trio is and what a great rapport its members have established between them.  Only musicians of the highest calibre will possess the ability to respond positively to the complexities and eccentricities of Galvin’s music. “Punch” looks set to become one of the most acclaimed and distinctive British jazz releases of 2016. 

 

 

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