“… the most exciting group operating in Europe today.”
The Penguin Guide to Jazz
“For all the absence of easy hooks of any kind, this is very superior, non-idiomatic, contemporary music that almost never treads water and promises a surprise around every corner.”
“Some of the music is brooding and darkly minimalist…. Some is squawky and impulsive, some vivid and conversational. This is virtuosic and varied improvisation.”
“Drummer/composer Steve Harris surfaced in the 1980s with the highly original UK jazz and free-funk band Pinski Zoo, but his ventures with Zaum are much more abstract – Harris himself has said of this album:
“The last thing I wanted it to sound like was the perceived notion of jazz, or anything else for that matter.”
Perceived notions certainly only appear here in fleeting glimpses, and almost always on the way to becoming something else – the jazziest element comes from Geoff Hearn’s Coltrane-to-Garbarek sax, which sometimes makes a late entry into abstract collective passages and wrenches both them and Harris’s inspired ensemble-rooted drumming into new directions.
Pattering brushwork scurries on under long electric viola sounds and doodling clarinet lines; squeezed sounds like reversed tapes, squeezebox effects like abstract folk music, or gothic vocal laments drift over edgy electric guitars or deep, wind-in-chimneys keyboard notes. But for all the absence of easy hooks of any kind, this is very superior non-idiomatic contemporary music that almost never treads water and promises a surprise around every corner.”
John Fordham – The Guardian
“Zaum’s work is the most profound step forward in the language of improvisation since the awkward twin birth of ‘free jazz’ and ‘free music’, consciously an attempt to devise a new, “guttural” musical language that reflects contemporary cultural realities and psychologies without having to use the (arguably) outdated jazz idiom to do so newcomers to Zaum will be conscious of a darkly evolving sound, music as mass and presence rather than as line and which seems to balance an orchestral richness of texture with the visceral immediacy of a rock concert.
Zaum’s music proposes and questions. It asks how we make music together and to a degree why we make music together. Zaum performances have elements of ritual and transcendence, but also an earthy physicality. I’ve never played anyone, jazz fan or not, a piece by Zaum without a positive reaction. It will make you think differently about all other music.
It’s quite simply the best British improvised record in more than a decade…”
Brain Morton – The Wire
“Total disregard for musical genre and an almost total open-mindedness for musical possibilities. The music is improvised, creative, with a sweet and accessible touch, yet fully exploratory of space, moods and sounds. The major strength of this band is its unique sound and its capacity to improvise fully coherent musical pieces that sound preconceived, structured. The music can change from almost classical moments over King Crimson, jazz and avant-garde – a highly unusual cocktail, but one that is wonderfully intense and cohesive and adds to the overall magnificence of the recording. It is an extraordinary collective achievement. A wonderful album to remember Steve Harris.”
Zaum…’I Hope You Never Love Anything As Much As I Love You’
“If British improvisation can be said to have a history – and it seems well enough established now – there is a new name to add to that exceptional mid-current of relatively fixed groupings who have managed to resist the sclerosis of style and remain creative. After AMM, Amalgam, SME and ISKRA 1903 comes ZAUM. Much as Paul Rutherford’s ISKRA 1903 took its name from Lenin’s revolutionary sheet, ZAUM is derived from the Futurist notion of a new linguistic Desperanto capable of expressing contemporary fractures and discontinuities. At first blush, that sounds like a rationale for transvalued ugliness, but the wonder of ZAUM is that every time, and this is their fourth record, they produce music of such ineffable loveliness. If AMM could only be said to play AMM music, ZAUM is very much Steve Harris’s project. The former Pinski Zoo drummer maintains a seismic pulse through every track whether the playing is light as sand or as apocalyptic as an earthquake. Harris has allowed the personnel to evolve, bringing in additional players at each transition to keep the music fresh. The core membership is saxophonist Geoff Hearn, touched but not overwhelmed by a Coltrane influence, electric violist Cathy Stevens and clarinetist Karen Wimhurst, both who come from a modern classical background, twinned guitarists Jim Black and Udo Dzierzanowski, who smuggle in avant rock and sound sculptures in equal measures, and rounding out the basic set-up is sonic artist Adrian Newton, whose live and found samples are never deployed wantonly but always with a clear musical logic. This time the invited artist is Andrea Parkins (best known for her work with Ellery Eskelin) who adds accordion and laptop textures and sounds as if she has been adopted into the family without formalities. Quite properly of music of this kind, its impossible to establish clearly who is playing what apart from the saxophone and clarinet parts, but one senses that Parkins has altered the dynamics, it would be wrong or plain unfashionable to suggest this is a more feminine ZAUM, but the yin/yang has definitely shifted as there is overt talk of love in the album title. This is utopian music in the very best sense, an imaginary space in which sound happens – sometimes with delicacy and some times with staggering intensity. Scroll forward to ‘Lost In The Midway’ and tell me you’re not moved or shaken. It’s quite simply the best British improvised record in more than a decade, and one that, far from overthrowing it’s ancestors, does them considerable honour”.
Brian Morton….The Wire.
Zaum…. A is For OX/ Live in Brighton *****
“Steve Harris, the formidable British improv and free-funk percussionist and music educator, died at 59 last year, and this double album is his final statement. Harris was the drummer in the long-running Pinski Zoo, a group that imparted Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman’s edge to dance grooves like few others – but he meant it when he said: “The last thing I wanted to sound like was the perceived notion of jazz, or anything else,” and his biggest love was Zaum, the remarkable cross-genre group he formed in 2001. One of this set’s discs collects “field recordings” captured around the UK in 2006-7, the other is an hour’s take from a single show in Brighton. The collection goes on to splice abstract noise, lyrical viola parts, Evan Parkerish free sax, regular jazz (Thelonious Monk’s Let’s Cool One fades in and out of one rugged conversation), guitar flame-throwing worthy of Marc Ducret, and – in sections of Live in Brighton – fearsome hard-funk grooving that’s like a free-jazz Bitches Brew. Harris’s breadth of vision and composer’s sense of pacing and drama is sorely missed, but if there has to be an epitaph, this is an excellent one.”
John Fordham – The Guardian
Torque: Lost And Found ****
A vibrant hour-plus of high energy, incisively sculptured free improvisation, Lost and Found features material from two live performances of 2006 and 2007. Saxophonist Geoff Hearn – who also contributed the fine cover art work – captures the music well in his sleeve characterisation of it as “small ‘sonic abstract paintings’ where each musical colour, shape and texture are put onto an invisible canvas by three like-minded musicains on a journey to create something unique”
The album is dedicated to the memory of drummer Steve Harris (1948-2008). Known to many for his work in Pinski Zoo, where free jazz and funk could fuel each other to exhiarating effect, Harris’s all-too-early death was a great loss to British music. Hearn – a distinctive, subtly attuned saxophonist of considerable rhythmic potency, melodic sensitivity and dymamic intelligence – worked with Harris in many contexts, from the Brighton-based Ten Men quartet of the late – 1970s onwards. The two men always had a special emphathy, which reached its zenith in the shape-shifting ZAUM ensemble which Harris put together in the first decade of this century – and which would (justly) receive considerable praise from fellow JJ contributor Brian Morton.
I enjoyed ZAUM, both live and on record. However, I can’t remember hearing anything which grabbed my attention as much as these Lost and Found sessions, which are an outstanding example of trio interplay at its best, as spontaneous as it is lucidly wrought. There’s not a note or texture too many, with the razor-sharp endings of the pieces quite uncanny in their appropriate abruptness. Recording engineer Adrian Newton deserves considerable credit for the quality of a recording which captures fully the dynamic and textural range of the simulaneous potency and poetry of Harris – somewhere between Sunny Murray and Paul Motian, with oblique nods to funk and rock. Relish, especially, the floating depths of the cross-accented meditation that is Mesa, the funky Lenoir or the savage grooves of Antique Farming Calendar.
Hearn’s sometimes contemplative, sometimes bustling authority on tenor and now ruminative, now searing abstractions on soprano are equally well served: sample Tiny Feet, Damn The Power, Herding Shrapnel, High Tension Lines and Pipsqueak. Throughout, the wide-ranging Black -who featured on a couple of ZAUM albums – is (like his cohorts) simply superb. He conjures a delicious range of post-Bailey, Frisell-touched sound shards, rhythmic impulse and electronic colour wash – and even comes close to slo-mo Loren Connors blues territory on the ultra-melodic Nogales. There aren’t that many recordings of free improvisation which I’ve felt compelled to play again and again, six or seven times straight through. This surpassing release is one such.
Michael Tucker – Jazz Journal
Torque
“Torque live, it’s a rush of sound, it’s energy drawn from the planets, enveloping, whispering, calling, crying, laughing. You are listening to something you know…but…has never been heard before! It is here and it is now” ‘J’m Black is an alchemist, creating extraordinary textures and feelings with his electric guitar, Geoff Hearn is really mighty on tenor and soprano saxophone skidding and sliding over under and around the work of Black, whilst Steve Harris is there on drums and percussion, placing the pulse, playing with time, tricking your ears with mischievous accents and open spaces then thick density like a felt blanket. The understanding between these musicians is telepathic. This is a delight! This is improvisation at it’s best. Hearn,Black,Harris…. three IS the magic number and I sense there is much much more to come.”
Chris Parfitt – Safehouse 2006.
Root Strata – ‘Deep Song’ CD Review 2020
In 1943 the Scottish painter and jazz musician Alan Davie (1920 – 2014) wrote in his note book that “The great works are made from life itself,stripped of superficiality and impurity;they are pure soul and joy,delicate like the delicateness of line across immence mountains” Decades on, here is one such work.
This is the suite of original pieces I highlighted in my Geoff Hearn: blues in space post of 19/10/2020, when I called it some of the best post-CODONA music I’d heard: for initial justification of such a characterisation, sample the poised yet flowing invocations that are Spirit Dance and The Storyteller. Deep Song is the second release from the Root Strata duo of Hearn and pianist and keyboardist Simon Robinson, following The Secret Of Root Strata of 2011.
Like that album, Deep Song – in equal measure reflective and penetrating, jazz-caressed and folk-limned – was produced by Robinson who has both a beautiful touch and an equisite, often entrancing sense of dynamincs, exploiting a telling range of software instrumental sounds (including kora, bass and percussion) in a rich yet astutely tempered blend of modally sprung, diversely energising rhythmic figures and atmospheric texture.
Hearn sets aside his potent tenor and baritone saxophone to feature concert C and alto flutes, shakuhachi and Native American flutes: all are played with a poetically compelling blend of pitch-bending economy and rhythmic subtlety. Soprano sax features on the spare and deeply “breathing” meditation that is the title track and the achingly tender Dream Weaver.
The last is a Hearn original, not the Charles Lloyd classic from the 1966 recording with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette. But Lloyd has long been one of Hearn’s chief elective affinities, together with Don Cherry and Yusef Lateef. If you’re familiar with the work of these indefatigable explorers of the human spirit, you’ll have some idea of what to expect from this music.
Don Cherry called the work of his latter years “primal music”. Think also here of the Native American flautist R Carlos Nakai or the Honkyoku shakuhachi of the travelling Zen masters of old (hear Empty Sky, which- together with the similarly rubato Winter Dream – is some of the most soul-piercing music I’ve heard) and you’ll come closer still to the transformative blend of unforced jazz literacy and world-embracing poetics which sparks the “pure soul and joy” that is Deep Song.
Michael Tucker Jazz Journal *****
AKIMA: Free Spirit Music
One of the things I’m most looking forward to – if and when the current Covid situation eases enough – is a gig by the Akima trio of Geoff Hearn (saxes, flutes), Hugh Bance (guitars) and Joe Philogene (African percussion, voice).
Geoff has run Akima for many years. Quality musicians from the world over have appeared with him in a band renowned for its potent mix of joyous melody and stomping rhythm. One of the early, large-ensemble incarnations of Akima featured African Yoruba “bata” drum masters to great effect in a couple of Arts Council-sponsored British tours..
If today’s Akima is a more intimate affair – sometimes in duo, sometimes in trio format – the impact of its music has in no way diminished. On the contrary: the present Akima remains strong on rolling, irresistible rhythms and soulful, singing melodies. For example, the music that Geoff cut with Joe Philogene on the 2018 recording The Journey – for which the Afro-Caribbean percussionist created the striking cover art – is some of the most uplifting I’ve heard for many a moon.
Enjoy the quality of tone and diversity of both intonation and rhythmic impulse which Geoff brings to his potent flute playing on pieces such as Sunrise, Passion Sweet, Butterflies and Water, and Earth Beams. And relish the rich and mellow tenor sound and patient, deeply mature sense of time he exhibits on the ultra-soulful Desert Mist and Being Here. Throughout, Philogene offers entrancing rhythm and texture, playing at various moments the doussn ‘goni (or hunter’s harp), kalimba, frame drum, udu drum, shakers, singing bowl and bells, besides contributing occasional vocals.
Like Gusavo Ovalles, the contemporary percussionist with the Cuban keyboard genius Omar Sosa, or the the late Nana Vasconcelos of CODONA fame, Philogene knows the value of dynamics, of space and rhythmic relief. Never overdoing things, his captivating warmth of tone, texture and accent offers an ideal springboard for Geoff’s various ventures into realms both sensuous and spiritual. Hear especially the delicate joy of the sonic poetry Philogene brings to both Butterflies and Water and his solo feature, Blossom Tree.
There is a telling lyricism to The Journey which recalls the insight of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi that, in contrast to the merely simplistic, true or meaningful simplicity emerges organically as the fruit of a lifetime’s endeavour. Over the years, Geoff Hearn has played all kinds of music, from the blues through many variants of modern and contemporary jazz to the shape-shifting worlds of free improv – to which the late Steve Harris’s ZAUM, of which Geoff was a constant and essential member, contributed so much. Today, Geoff is operating at a further special level, playing with striking originality in the sort of zone one associates with elective affinities of his such as Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry and Charles Lloyd.
Is this latest Akima music jazz, or some sort of emergent Universal Folk Music? And, do such distinctions really matter? Like the surpassing, Zen-touched Deep Song album Geoff recorded recently with keyboardist Simon Robinson – which got a five star review from me in Jazz Journal – The Journey cuts through and beyond all such questions and categories to approach the irradiated heart of things.
For Geoff, music has never been an end in itself. Rather, it is has always been a – perhaps the – crucial element driving what continues to be a quest to sense and cherish what the Catalan painter and printmaker Antoni Tàpies called “the real reality” of our life here on earth. Such a reality lies far indeed from the reductive worlds of mass entertainment and political ideology. Small wonder, then, that Geoff calls what Akima plays today “Free Spirit Music”.
Michael Tucker
Free Spirit Music
Geoff Hearn / Nigel Thomas / Hugh Bance
Brighton Unitarian Church 24 November 2023
The imposing neo-classical portico of Amon Henry Wilds’s 1820 Unitarian Church, set in the cultural centre of Brighton and Hove at the northern end of New Road (which houses Brighton’s famous Theatre Royal) leads to a chapel-sized space. Fortunately for preachers, speakers and musicians alike, the clean lines and generous ceiling height offer a superb acoustic.
For many years the Church has put on lunchtime concerts, usually of classical music but also featuring other genres, including jazz. With a suggested entrance donation fee of £5, a late-November concert offered a must-take opportunity to enjoy music from the deliciously attuned improvising trio of Geoff Hearn (ts, fs), Nigel Aubrey Thomas (b) and Hugh Bance (elg, laptop, samples). From first note to last, the near- full house accorded the now meditative, now engagingly grooved music both the keenest attention and a richly enthusiastic response.
A fair few JJ readers will be aware of the respect and admiration I have for Hearn: to date, my October 2020 Blues in Space profile of Geoff has had over 7,000 “hits”. As that profile detailed, Geoff has been active in many an area of music, including the blues, fusion, modern and contemporary mainstream and the free improvisation of the much-lauded Zaum, led by that inspirational drummer, (the late) Steve Harris.
The past few years have seen Geoff focus on a range of diverse, often intimately pitched duo and trio work: music such as the 2020 Root Strata duo release Deep Song (featuring Simon Robinson on keyboards) bridges worlds in what one might characterise as a post- CODONA way.
Long interested in the spiritual and musical traditions of both Zen and First Nation (Indigenous, or Native) Americans, Geoff opened the concert with some piping upper-register calls from one of the various Native American flutes he has collected over the years. Later, he turned to shakuhachi bamboo flute to season proceedings with some sublimated Far Eastern accents and atmosphere. Some mysterious, broadly phrased figures on alto flute offered complementary contrast to various patient and potent passages, as reflective as they were ascensional, of soulful post-Coltrane tenor sax.
Some of the melodically oriented improvisation which distinguished the organically evolving programme was underpinned by an atmospheric, harmonium-like minor drone supplied by Bance. And a wonderful take on a bubbling “call” piece entitled Yuba, by Mary Youngblood – the distinguished Native American flautist, composer and social activist – was rounded out by fresh treatments of Pharoah Sanders’s Harvest Time and Joe Henderson’s Earth (the latter from the 1973 Elements with, a.o. others, Alice Coltrane).
Hearn calls the work of his Akima trio with Bance and Joe Philogene (pc, v) “Free Spirit Music”. And so it was here. The dynamically astute Bance played a key role in setting and sustaining the overall template of meditative focus and spiritual expansion, ad libitum reflection and enticing groove. His diversely employed tampura and tabla loops and touches of Telecaster tone and linearity supplied the sort of colour and texture which spoke of a sensibility as painterly as it was poetic. Best of all, Bance – an accomplished painter whose early turn-ons in music included Bert Jansch, Davy Graham and John Martyn – showed the value of space. Nothing he brought to the music was cluttered or overdone.
The same must be said of the many compelling contributions from Nigel Thomas, in a range of pizzicato and arco lines of consummate quality. A bassist of vast experience, Thomas counts Ray Brown, Paul Chambers and Charlie Haden among his favourites, while having also long been inspired by many a horn player and vocalist, as well as such a blues-and-gospel touched pianist as Hampton Hawes.
Much in tune with the thoughts of Geoff Hearn, what Thomas said to me after the concert summed up what made these forty-five or so minutes at the Brighton Unitarian Church so refreshing, so magical. “When we play things like Harvest Time or Earth, of course we respect the structure, or the mood, of the originals. But in essence, the pieces function as springboards for us to take the music … somewhere else, somewhere ‘beyond’. Geoff has spoken of seeking meditative inwardness and spiritual elevation in and through music and as a practising Buddhist, I can only agree.”
“You can debate forever what sort of music might best bring you to such states of consciousness: you probably noticed that our music wasn’t stuffed with harmony, for example, it was more modal in nature. The point with this trio is to get into the sort of space where the notes, the lines, the group interaction, all have the chance – like humans – to realise, or release, the full extent of their potential resonance.”
“ Let me put that another way. One of my favourite bassists today is Christian McBride. What a player, with so much musical knowledge and technical capacity! But those things never get in the way of his musicality. And that’s what we’re after, in a register that’s both literate and our own – and which, hopefully, can speak to listeners, giving them the space and time to breathe and enter into – and so help sustain and develop – the music.”
Michael Tucker