Jake Long

“City Swamp”

(New Soil NS0054CD)

Jake Long – drums, Nubya Garcia – tenor saxophone, Tamar Osborn – flute, bass clarinet, Binker Golding – tenor saxophone, Shirley Tetteh – guitar, Artie Zaitz – guitar, Amane Suganami – Wurlitzer piano, Al MacSween – Hammond organ, Twm Dylan – electric bass, Tim Doyle – percussion

London based drummer and composer Jake Long is best known as the leader of the band Maisha, a septet known for fusing together elements of Coltrane / Pharaoh Sanders inspired spiritual jazz with Afrobeat and blending them with other musical influences sourced from the cultural melting pot that is 21st century London.

In 2018 Maisha released the acclaimed album “There Is A Place” on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label, a work which attracted considerable critical approval and which also struck a chord with the wider listening public, selling very healthily for what was essentially a jazz release. Maisha was part of the same emergent London jazz scene that reached out to a younger audience and which spawned such talents as saxophonist Nubya Garcia, keyboard player Joe Armon-Jones and the bands Kokoroko and the Mercury Prize winning Ezra Collective.

The Jazzmann first heard Maisha in 2017 when they supported the American trumpeter Christian Scott and his band at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, a gig that formed part of the 2017 EFG London Jazz Festival. Maisha’s saxophonist, Nubya Garcia, also guested briefly with Scott and his group. My account of this show can be found a part of my Festival coverage here.
https://www.thejazzmann.com/features/article/efg-london-jazz-festival-wednesday-november-15th-2017

By this time Maisha had already released the live EP “Welcome To A New Welcome” (2016), which appeared on the Jazzre; freshed imprint. The group’s recorded output also includes the more recent “Open The Gates” EP (Brownswood 2020).

The success of “There Is A Place” led to a much lauded collaboration with the veteran American saxophonist and occasional vocalist Gary Bartz, with whom they recorded a 2020 album for the Anglo-Dutch record label Night Dreamer’s “Direct to Disc” series.

Maisha also toured with Bartz and their excellent live performance at the 2022 Cheltenham Jazz Festival is featured as part of my Festival coverage here;
https://www.thejazzmann.com/features/article/sunday-at-cheltenham-jazz-festival-01-05-2022

In addition to his work with Maisha Long has also worked with keyboard players Ben Hayes and Joe Armon-Jones,  bassist Huw Bennett, trombonist Rosie Turton, reeds player Shabaka Hutchings, tuba player Theon Cross, Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz,  turntableist and producer Maxwell Owin,  US hip hop artist Saul Williams and guitarist and songwriter Oscar Jerome. He has also been a member of the unclassifiable and genre bending outfit Snapped Ankles.

Long has also ‘depped’ for the otherwise all female ensemble Nerija, a now defunct ensemble that also played its part in the London jazz renaissance and which also included Nubya Garcia.

Long’s first album release under his own name is a conceptual affair that is intended to “represent the dystopian cycles of decay and faceless regeneration of London”. As a native Londoner this is clearly a subject that is close to Long’s heart.

“City Swamp” draws inspiration from the anti-capitalist writings of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, author of the book “Capitalist Realism”.

It also sees Long widening his range of musical influences to include dub reggae, krautrock and techno. The spiritual jazz and Afrobeat elements remain but also central to this latest project are the influences of funk / Afro-futurist pioneers Funkadelic and especially the music of “Bitches Brew” era Miles Davis.

The music was actually recorded in 2019, prior to the collaboration with Bartz, but it has taken over five years for the project to finally come to fruition.

The music of “City Swamp” is the result of extended live in the studio recordings that were later edited and re-assembled by Long using a selection of analogue effects and an old reel to reel tape recorder to loop signals back on themselves, to create delays and to dub the recordings. Essentially it’s the same methodology that producer Teo Macero deployed on “Bitches Brew” and Long also borrows from the methods of dub reggae producers such as King Tubby and Scientist.

“City Swamp” features many of the members of Maisha, among them Garcia, Tetteh, Suganami, Dylan and Doyle and in many ways it’s tempting to think of the album as a continuation of Maisha’s work. Indeed it may even have been originally intended to be Maisha’s second album. However the music is darker in tone than Maisha’s more celebratory output and is more reliant on post performance production techniques.

The finished product may have been edited down from even longer performances but nevertheless the four tracks that constitute “City Swamp” still represent lengthy affairs, all but one lasting in excess of ten minutes.

The album commences with the fifteen minute “Ideological Rubble”, the title taken from a term coined by the political author Alex Williams that is quoted in Fisher’s book – “the political landscape was littered with ‘ideological rubble’, clearing space for a new anti-capitalism, ‘a renewal that is not a return’”.
The piece opens slowly and atmospherically with post performance production effects mingling with the shimmer of keyboards, guitar and percussion and with the incantatory sounds of the twin tenor saxes a clarion call underpinned by the rumble of the leader’s drums. Those spiritual jazz influences are very much there as the music ebbs and flows, moving between loosely structured atmospheric episodes and more groove driven passages driven by drums percussion, electric bass and funky guitar and keyboards. The saxes intertwine above this propulsive rhythmic backdrop, which is also punctuated by regular dub reggae style explosions. There are also some engaging keyboard explorations from Suganami on Wurlitzer as the music continues to gather momentum before dissolving into spacey abstraction once more. Echoed sax ruminations and ethereal keyboard shimmerings eventually lead to the creation of a second groove, initially the fuel for MacSween’s Hammond soloing, with the saxes subsequently steering the music towards its final resolution.

At a little over six minutes duration “Celestial Soup” is the shortest track on the album. The press release also describes it as “the most abstract composition on the record” and certainly the introduction is suitably brooding and atmospheric with eerie production effects, twinkling keyboards and the icy shimmer of the leader’s cymbals. Long sax melody lines intertwine above a bubbling sound that recalls the simmering of the proverbial primordial soup. Out of this a powerful grove emerges, albeit one subject to a barrage of production effects, these further embellished by melodic fragments courtesy of keyboards, guitar and most obviously saxophone. It’s less obviously ‘jazz’ than some of the other pieces and more obviously influenced by dub reggae, techno and electronica, sometimes recalling the music of the late Martin France’s Spin Marvel project.

At just over ten minutes “Swamp” is intended to be “an instrumental response to the word ‘swamp’, intended to evoke a city flooded with cheap development, a political statement woven into a mesmeric soundworld, dystopian in the extreme”.
Out of the now customary electronic atmospherics emerges a monumental,  monolithic groove,  deep and sinisterly funky. This represents the framework for Osborn’s bass clarinet ruminations and MacSween’s soaring Hammond solo, this followed by a Tetteh guitar solo that reaches even further, spiralling up into the stratosphere, aided by MacSween’s Hammond and by the increasingly turbulent rhythms fermenting below. It’s a solo that has invited Hendrix comparisons, and rightly so. Finally things slow down and we sink back into the swamp. Effectively the title track, and definitely an album highlight.

The album concludes with near twelve Minute “Silhouette” which quickly emerges from the mire courtesy of a bubbling percussion groove augmented by a looping guitar and electric bass motif, these combining to provide the impetus for the melodic and textural inventions variously supplied by saxes, flute and keyboards, with one of the twin saxophonists featuring as the main soloist. There’s a brief pause for reflection before the establishment of a different groove, this time crowned by another soaring guitar solo. Eventually the music resolves itself more quietly, perhaps in deep space, or perhaps in the City Swamp of the title.

“Silhouette” was also released as a single and the shortened four minute “Radio Edit” can be heard on Long’s Bandcamp page and presumably also appears on the digital version of the album.
https://jakelong.bandcamp.com/album/city-swamp

In the main “City Swamp” has been well received by the jazz critical fraternity but Eddie Myer, writing for Jazzwise magazine, expressed his doubts about the “long jam style wigouts” and opined that the music was somehow simultaneously “rich and monotonous”.  He also called for “stronger writing, tighter editing and a clearer sense of purpose”.

On the whole I enjoyed “City Swamp” and there’s certainly a lot going on in terms of colour and texture and there are some excellent sax, guitar and keyboard solos in addition to those ever evolving grooves and the carefully crafted production techniques. But at the same time, as Myers notes, it’s all a little relentless with all four pieces representing journeys through essentially the same musical landscape. There’s a lot of variety in terms of the sound, but not much genuine light and shade with regards to dynamics, so I get where Myers is coming from.

Having seen Maisha play live on a couple of occasions I suspect that this music would also work best in the live environment,  where the listener could totally immerse themselves in the immediacy of the moment and the grooves, colours and textures and the fascinating mix of sounds.

I’m more enamoured of the music than Mires is, but not quite so enthralled as some of the other commentators, which puts me in a kind of ‘halfway house’, if you will. I’d certainly relish the chance of seeing this music being performed live, even if it’s not necessarily on repeat listening at home.

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