Mustard Pie
Vortex, London
14/07/2010

Jan Kopinski - Tenor Sax
Mark Holub - Drums
Liran Donin - Electric bass
Seb Rochford - Drums
Tom Herbert - Electric bass

Mustard Pie originally came together to headline the Spitalfields Summer Stew, a weekend of free outdoor jazz concerts held in London, in September 2009. The set they played that night was pretty good, though somewhat underwhelming given the expectations raised by a dual rhythm section line-up of Mercury Award acclaimed talent fronted by a veteran saxophonist, and it didn’t linger in my memory. The preceding show of insouciant authority by the trio of Stan Sulzmann, Kenny Wheeler and John Parricelli was, perhaps,  a tough act to follow.

This Vortex gig was the first time Mustard Pie had performed since then. I prepared for it by pulling out of the rack neither Led Bib’s nor Polar Bears’ latest albums but Pinski Zoo’s 1990 classic East Rail East. I’d forgotten just how heavy Ornette Coleman’s influence over Kopinski was at the time. What I hadn’t forgotten was just how convincing the Pinskis’ emulation of In All Languages-era Prime Time was.

The last time I recall seeing Pinski Zoo live was in 2006, also at the Vortex, again at a Led Bib-curated ?Summer Stew’ event, and Kopinski’s music then was still clearly rooted in Coleman’s harmolodics. So the biggest and best surprise of Mustard Pie’s second gig was how dramatically they’ve re-contextualised Kopinski’s playing; the Coleman influence was markedly less explicit, and that’s for the better. Kopinski is a unique stylist, and while tonally his sound remains indebted to Coleman’s he favours longer musical lines and has a less emotive sensibility. I’m not entirely convinced of Kopinski’s mastery of the effects he often applies to further sustain and etherise his sound, but it does add a further characterful twist to his playing, and enables him to integrate in novel ways his playing with the hard fusion cooked up by his new bandmates.

Behind Kopinski, Mustard Pie’s drummers flank the two bassists, so the Led Bib duo at stage right is mirrored by their counterparts from Polar Bear. First impressions are inevitably of the most obvious contrasts. Of the two drummers, Mark Holub is the more expressive and dynamic where Seb Rochford is comparatively laconic and economical. On his polished Fender electric bass, crop-haired Liran Donin plays very much in the power-fusion mould. The bearded Tom Herbert also plays a Fender, albeit a more weathered one, and his sound is correspondingly warmer and earthier. At first, then, it’s the Led Bib duo that seems to set the tone and pace, with Holub energetically backing up some fiercely funk/fusion bass lines from Donin, but over the course of the full set this dynamic often shifted and Rochford or Herbert came to dictate the pace. Rochford can really hit hard when he’s moved to, and the emphatic precision of his attack always retains a sense of swing that provides a lovely counterpoint to Holub’s more insistently forceful approach. Herbert can be credited with shaping some of the more carefully nuanced textures that the group explore during some of their more brooding passages, and his attention to detail does much more than fill out Donin’s lines, it enriches them.

The closest comparison I can make with Mustard Pie’s sound is that of Roman hardcore/jazz trio Zu, whose bassist Massimo Pupillo has a similarly fluid and attacking style to Donin’s, or perhaps that of Zu’s sometime collaborators, Ken Vandermark’s Spaceways Inc. But whereas Spaceways Inc. are clearly indebted to 70’s soul jazz and P-Funk, and Zu tend to gravitate to extremity, Mustard Pie’s music is refreshingly free of quotation or direct evocation. They speak their own fiercely, eccentrically funky language, and it’s a language that should by rights have tremendous crossover appeal. The group were constantly, though subtly, virtuosic, without grandstanding or overt soloing.

Purists would argue that the music Mustard Pie play isn’t Jazz. Their structures were tight, efficient, and economical, and they weren’t above locking into some seriously satisfying grooves. It’s hard to believe that everything they played was created spontaneously in the moment, as they claim. I suspect that at least some guide rhythms and basic trajectories were mapped out in advance, and all to the good. This was, from memory, a marked improvement on the group’s début outing, and though there were one or two sections during the more introspective second set that didn’t quite gel satisfactorily, for the most part this was a more than solidly convincing performance. It’s to the credit of all concerned that musicians of such varying temperament can play together, to their individual strengths, with no grandstanding or bruised ego. I hope there’s a lot more to come from Mustard Pie; if they can just come up with a name that a curious punter can take seriously?