Torin Davies Quartet featuring James Maddren, Music Spoken Here, The Marr’s Bar, Worcester, 05/09/2024.

Torin Davies – guitar, George Garford – alto sax, Asaph Tal – double bass, James Maddren – drums

Torin Davies is a Midlands based guitarist and composer who began his musical career as a drummer before becoming increasingly fascinated by and passionate about the guitar. He’s now best known as a guitarist but retains an interest in the art of drumming.

As a drummer Davies studied jazz at the  junior department of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC) where his tutors included trumpeter / bassist Percy Pursglove and saxophonist Mike Williams. He also attended a National Youth Jazz Collective summer school  where he studied with flautist Gareth Lockrane and vocalist Cleveland Watkiss and relished the opportunity to play with the great bassist Dave Holland. Other leading musicians with whom Davies has performed include pianist / organist Ross Stanley and saxophonist / rapper Soweto Kinch.

Davies’ growing enthusiasm for the guitar was inspired by musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and the American jazz guitarist David Gilmore. Initially he played blues, grunge and rock but under the ongoing influence of Pursglove and Williams he turned increasingly towards jazz and subsequently began to study for a degree in jazz guitar at the RBC.

Having now graduated he is about to embark on a Masters at the conservatoire in Amsterdam, where he is also looking forward to bringing musicians from the Birmingham, London and Amsterdam jazz scenes together.

My first encounter with Davies’ playing was in 2022 when he was part of the annual Jazz Exchange event at that year’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival. Davies impressed as part of an Anglo-Italian quintet featuring students from the RBC and its counterpart in Siena.

The Jazz Exchange group also featured saxophonist and composer Dan Lockheart, who brought his own quintet to Music Spoken Here at the Marr’s Bar in September 2023. That event was presented in conjunction with the Jazz Central Mentorship Scheme, which is supported by Jazz Midlands, the consortium of West Midlands based promoters of which Music Spoken Here is a member.

The Scheme is designed to assist young Jazz Graduates and is overseen by  the leading jazz bassist Arnie Somogyi, a tutor on the jazz course at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.  Six young Birmingham based jazz musicians have been commissioned to write new works, working in conjunction with a more established jazz musician of their own choosing acting as a ‘mentor’. Typically the mentors have also passed through a Jazz Conservatoire education and although now well established on the international jazz scene some are still relatively young themselves.

Tonight’s performance was part of the 2024 Jazz Central Mentorship scheme. This year’s participants are;

Torin Davies (guitar) with mentor James Maddren (drums)

James Borland (trumpet) with mentor George Crowley (sax)

Andrew Duncan (drums) with mentor Rachael Cohen (sax)

Dave Flanagan (bass) with mentor Phil Robson (guitar)

James Romaine (sax) with mentor Gareth Lockrane (flute)

Alex Clarke (sax) with mentor Alex Garnett (sax)

The six young musicians, in conjunction with their mentors,  will present their work at the 2024 Jazz Central Mentoring Festival which will be held at the 1000 Trades venue in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter over the weekend of Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th of September.

The bands involved will also take their music to other jazz venues around the Midlands that form part of the Jazz Midlands consortium. Tonight’s show was the first of these performances and I also intend to cover the performance by the James Borland / George Crowley group that will take place at the Corn Exchange, Ross on Wye on Thursday September 12th 2024.

This evening’s performance represented the premiere of Davies’ Festival commission, the five part suite “Tales from the Centre”, a work inspired by the history of the West Midlands area. The new suite represented the first half of tonight’s performance, with the second set featuring four more Davies originals, plus an innovative arrangement of the jazz standard “I’ll Be Seeing You”.

It would appear that Davies is a prolific composer. In 2023 he released the digital album “Strange Terrain”, a work featuring six of the guitarist’s original compositions recorded by an ensemble including Dan Lockheart on tenor sax and Lucy-Anne Daniels on vocals. However, none of these pieces was performed tonight. “Strange Terrain” is available via Davies’ Bandcamp page here;
https://torindavies.bandcamp.com/album/strange-terrain

The performance began with the first movement of the suite, a composition based on the blues form and named “Boomtown”, the title referencing the city of Coventry and its industrial heyday. A bebop inspired intro featuring the alto sax and guitar exchanges of Garford and Davies was followed by more expansive solos from each, with leader Davies going first. As befits a composition based on a conventional jazz form the piece also included features for bassist Tal and drummer and mentor Maddren.

The lively opener was followed by a more reflective and atmospheric piece titled “The Lunar Society”. It’s a composition that honours the still ongoing scientific and cultural institution that was formed in Birmingham in the late 18th century by such luminaries as James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestly and Josiah Wedgwood.
An ethereal intro featured the sounds of guitar effects and breathy alto sax, with Tal later adding bowed bass and Madden the chimes and shimmers of mallets on cymbals. As the drummer switched to sticks the sound of Garford’s alto became more assertive, with Davies subsequently taking over with a passage of clangorous guitar, the notes ringing out like the tolling of a bell.

The title of “Revolutions” referenced the Industrial Revolution in general and the patterns and machinations of the associated machinery. The intertwining melodies of sax and guitar provided a musical depiction, aided by the quasi-mechanical tick of Maddren’s drums. Garford and Davies then delivered fluent individual solos before returning to their earlier tightly meshed, interlocking exchanges.

“Cross of Nails” was the second composition to be inspired by Coventry, in this case the city’s Cathedral. This was introduced by a passage of unaccompanied guitar, subsequently joined by alto sax, double bass and brushed drums. This was a gentle, lyrical piece with something of the feel of a jazz ballad about it, and with Davies’ solo exhibiting something of a Metheny-esque quality. Tal’s double bass solo and Garford’s alto sax solo were similarly melodic on this beautiful and evocative composition.

The first set concluded with “The Scouring”, a piece inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent much of his childhood in Birmingham. Tolkien’s most famous works, “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” draw inspiration from the landscapes of the Midlands and Davies’ title is a direct reference to “The Scouting of the Shire”, the penultimate chapter of “The Lord of The Rings”. For Davies the title “The Scouring” also refers to the encroachment of industry onto what was previously either agricultural land or wilderness, and to the scars the Industrial Revolution has left behind, thus imparting the composition with an environmental sub-text.
An atmospheric and evocative intro featuring brushed drums, guitar, alto sax and bowed bass, was followed by a brief unaccompanied guitar episode. All this eventually led to something more appropriate to the tune’s title and subject as Garford’s alto soared above powerful rhythms typified by Maddren’s solid backbeat and Davies’ increasingly malevolent chording, the guitarist eventually taking flight himself with an appropriately excoriating solo.

The “Tales from the Centre” suite was well received by a pleasingly sizeable audience at the Marr’s Bar that included Arnie Somogyi among its number. Dave Fuller of Music Spoken Here must have been well pleased with the turn out for this opening event in MSH’s third series at this venue.

The second set commenced with “Entropy”, a composition with more of an orthodox jazz feel that saw Davies and Garford doubling up on the melody before delivering their own solos, Garford going first. Maddren, one of the UK’s most respected and in demand drummers, was featured at the traps,, circumnavigating his kit above the loosely structured backing provided by his colleagues.

“Ugly House”, inspired by Davies’ childhood memories of holidays in North Wales, was introduced by a passage of unaccompanied guitar, with bass, alto sax and brushed drums subsequently added. Tal was featured with another melodic double bass solo and Davies followed with a similarly mellifluous guitar solo, the piece ending as it began with a passage of unaccompanied guitar.

An alto sax / guitar duet introduced “Eon”, with bass and drums subsequently added as the piece took on a song like structure characterised by soaring sax and guitar melodies and sturdy rock influenced rhythms. The piece was a tour de force for Garford who delivered a fluent but powerful alto sax solo. I recall being impressed with Garford at the 2024 Cheltenham Jazz Festival where I saw him playing alto with the young electro-jazz ensemble Dreamscapes and tenor with Sam Eastmond’s twelve piece band performing the music of John Zorn’s “Bagatelles”.

Davies’  intriguing arrangement of the jazz standard “I’ll Be Seeing You” was ushered in by a passage of unaccompanied guitar. The leader then sat back as Garford delivered a probing solo with the group temporarily in saxophone trio mode. Davis then returned to deliver a thoughtful guitar solo, followed by Tal on double bass. Garford was then featured again with an unaccompanied alto sax cadenza towards the close.

The performance concluded with the Davies original “Tomorrow and Tomorrow”. A loosely structured intro gave way to urgent guitar riffing and restless drum rhythms, these fuelling powerful solos from Garford on alto and Davies on guitar. Finally mentor Maddren asserted himself with a dynamic drum feature. At times during this piece I was reminded of the mighty Partisans, another group with an incisive guitar / sax frontline (mainly tenor in their case) and a virtuoso drummer.

But ultimately tonight was all about Torin Davies, an agile and imaginative guitar soloist and an inventive and intelligent composer and arranger. He was well supported by his illustrious mentor and also by Garford and Tal, both of whom made impressive contributions.

Dave Fuller was keen for the quintet to play a deserved encore, but they had exhausted their material at this point and also Maddren was facing a long drive back to London, with the prospect of returning to the Midlands just two days later for the quartet’s Birmingham show.

Following the “Strange Terrain” recording it is to be hoped that Davies will also be able to document the “Tales from the Centre” suite, in addition to the other original material that we heard this evening. This was genuinely impressive new music and Davies looks set to become an increasingly important presence on the UK jazz scene and beyond in the years to come.