The Edge Project

“Within This World Within My Mind” (Safehouse Records 1213)

“Dead Horses And Divorces” (Safehouse Records 1015)

These two albums are the latest in a series of releases by the ensemble once known simply as The Edge but now renamed as The Edge Project.

The Edge Project is the brainchild of the South Wales based trumpeter and composer Ben Thomas, originally a native of Pembrokeshire. I’m used to seeing Thomas performing jazz standards at informal gigs with local musicians from both sides of the Welsh Border and can confirm that he’s a highly accomplished soloist on both trumpet and flugelhorn.

The music of The Edge Project presents a very different side of Thomas’ musical personality. In 2011 I reviewed the first two albums in the ongoing Edge Project series, “We All Fall Down” (2009) and “Dark Scrawls” (2011). Both records are song based with the former featuring the singing of Laura Collins and with Emily Wright, currently making a name for herself with the group Moonlight Saving Time, taking over on “Dark Scrawls”.

Both of these albums, and particularly “We All Fall Down” reminded me of the jazz and poetry experiments carried out in the 1960s and 70s by composers such as Michael Garrick and Mike Westbrook with the vocals of both Collins and Wright sometimes reminiscent of the great Norma Winstone. The music and lyrics on both albums is generally sombre in tone and the mood is very different to that of Thomas’ jazz standards gigs.

Both “Within This World Within My Mind” (2013) and the recently released “Dead Horses And Divorces” (2015) can be seen as direct continuations of The Edge Project’s previous works with both albums centred around lyrics and vocals on a series of relatively short songs.

Thomas cites a bewildering variety of artists as influences on his group’s music, among them The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and David Bowie. More jazz orientated sources include The Cinematic Orchestra, Chick Corea and Robert Wyatt while a generalised folk influence is mentioned too. Essentially this is art song filtered through a prism that includes elements of jazz, folk, pop and rock.

Again Thomas leads ensembles featuring vocalists and musicians based in the Welsh Borders and the West Country. “Within..” features the twin vocal front line of Tanya Walker and Emily Wright and the album also features the voices of Laura Collins and Carol Graham. The instrumentalists include Ruth Hammond (baritone sax), Jonathan Taylor (piano), Erika Lyons (double bass), Jemima Phillips (harp) and Scott Hammond (drums). The material is song and narrative based and once again there is little scope for conventional jazz soloing although all the musicians play well with Thomas’ trumpet and flugel subtly dominating the instrumental arrangements.

Most of these performers also appear on “Dead Horses And Divorces” but with Walker absent the role of main vocalist again passes to Emily Wright with Collins and Thomas’s partner Robyn Hobbs also making vocal contributions. Hobbs also plays some percussion and provides the distinctive artwork for both these albums. The main change among the instrumental ranks sees Lyons’ acoustic bass replaced by Greig Robinson’s electric, a move that is wholly in keeping with the more overtly pop/rock feel of the later album.

“Within This World…” is very much a continuation of the earlier “Dark Scrawls” with its layered voices, poetic lyrics and arrangements that draw on both jazz and pop song forms. Again its unfortunate that the album packaging doesn’t include transcriptions of Thomas’s lyrics as the use of human voices and the words they sing is such a key part of the overall concept. Once again I’m loath to analyse each track on an album that is highly personalised and sometimes sombre or philosophical in tone. However there are also lighter, quirkier moments such as the playful “Moon Monkey”. 

Overall “Within This World…” sees Thomas and his colleagues moving further away from the Garrick/Winstone influences of “We All Fall Down”, a process that began with “Dark Scrawls”. Despite the jazz instrumentation and arrangements the music edges ever closer to a distinctive, quirky variety of left field pop music, a highly personalised form of art song.

“Dead Horses…” takes the process even further with a harder, more obviously pop/rock sound but still retains the essential poetic quirkiness that runs throughout The Edge Project. It’s further removed from jazz than the earlier albums in the series and sees Thomas establishing an even more distinctive and personalised identity of his own.

Away from The Edge Project Thomas has also been moving further away from the standards repertoire even with regard to his jazz performances. A recent gig at Black Mountain Jazz in Abergavenny saw him co-leading a group with Shrewsbury based saxophonist Ed Rees which put the emphasis on original jazz compositions plus inspired covers of pop and rock material by artists as diverse as A-Ha and Robert Wyatt. Jazz composers covered included Sam Rivers and Joe Henderson, not the most immediately obvious of names, and even “Softly As in A Morning Sunrise” was treated to an unusual and interesting arrangement. The four instrumentalists were augmented by the ‘live art’ of Robyn Hobbs whose spontaneously created visual images formed an interesting and innovative adjunct to the music.

As creative partners Thomas and Hobbs are clearly keen to adopt a ‘multi-media’ approach that combines music, words and visual imagery, elements that all come together in The Edge Project.

While I have every admiration for the ideas behind The Edge Project I don’t find it the easiest music to listen to and feel that it falls rather too easily into the ‘too pop for jazz, too jazz for pop’ category. It’s difficult to decide just what the audience is likely to be for this music, a member ofThomas’ jazz audience buying a copy of any Edge album at a standards gig is likely to end up feeling confused and it’s hard to see where the pop and rock audience is going to come from - although the presence of the increasingly popular Emily Wright may help in this regard. But there’s no denying the skill and care that has gone into these increasingly distinctive, personal and original recordings. 

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