Martin Longley stalked a pair of sturdy UK math-jazz trios up the hill to Kings Heath.
GoGo Penguin/Mammal Hands
Hare & Hounds
March 13th
Even though these two trios operate a musical language that has been growing steadily during the last decade, they each adopt divergent practices, adding to the gestural gene pool.
Could it all have started with Sweden’s e.s.t? Or, in the UK, with Neil Cowley? Maybe there are touches of The Bad Plus, or Phronesis. It’s a certain kind of pumped up, grandiose manifestation of compositional intricacy, quite difficult to stamp with a brand, but we all sort of know what’s expected of this line-up, this generation within jazz.
For starters, these trios pulled a voluminous crowd that’s more in keeping with what a popular rock combo would draw, and a younger spread, to boot. Marketing, promotion and streaming habits can be puzzling beasts. So Mammal Hands supported GoGo Penguins, received with equal enthusiasm from the human punters. It almost seemed like a bona fide double bill.
The Mammalian line-up is brothers Jordan Smart (saxophones), Nick Smart (piano) and Jesse Barrett (drums), who met up whilst busking around Norwich, only three years back. They were soon signed up to Gondwana, the Manchester record label, which is also the home of the Penguins.
It took a few numbers for the Hands to weave their spell, starting out much akin to some of the combos listed above, but with their cyclic, snaking melodies growing more individuality, particularly as the saxophone curled breathily around the thick legs of the structures. A pulsing repetition seduced gradually, full of emotional keening, working for a steady ascension.
Manchester’s GoGo Penguin (also formed in 2012) sounded more conventional immediately afterwards, although this is a comparative term. Their sound is more pugilistically inclined, with a bludgeoning, woolly mammoth bass throb that flung Nick Blacka’s acoustic upright into a dub-heavy dominance. He spent some time at the start wrestling with unruly bass strings, but everything settled down eventually, and the trio could boot into their skittering acoustic impersonation of electronic dance music.
Pianist Chris Illingworth and drummer Rob Turner added to the character of slightly-too-slick patterning, as if the threesome have unavoidably spent too much time hammering away at the pieces, almost playing them too well, chipping off any spiky anomalies.
Ultimately, both acts delivered sets which combined hard muscled repeats with cerebral acrobatics, and once all stylistic conventions had been swallowed, it was easy to admire this strong combination of jazz’s growing sub-genre of advanced piano trios, with the mammals for once actually being further along the evolutionary line than the penguins.