The Necks – Chris Abrahams at the grand piano, Lloyd Swanton on mini upright bass and Tony Buck at the drums – slow the world down.
Before each of two sets, they are silently motionless for a minute as they clear their minds.
Then, Swanton or Abrahams summons up the first impulse and turns it into sound – a simple bass figure, a trilling piano pattern – and they are off.
The piece of music – spontaneous and unrepeatable – will last 45 minutes, it will not divert hugely from that initial pattern... or it might.
The accretion of ideas, of nuances, is so slow, then so incrementally developed that seconds become minutes, one minute becomes ten and 45 seem to have acquired the experiences of a whole day and night.
Or did they pass in one held breath? Time is definitely being played with.
All three bring very special abilities to their playing. Buck’s are the most obvious. He slides a small hand cymbal around the metal rim of his floor tom, creating the metallic rhythm of a factory machine. Or, against an immaculately fast high-hat rhythm, he plays a constant bass drum beat which, so slowly, so infinitesimally, itself slows.
Swanton sets up atmospheric bowed monotones and then compulsive rhythms of his own, bouncing bow on strings.
Abrahams spends most of his time on a handful of notes in the middle of the keyboard, playing fidgety repeated patterns, also with finely nuanced adjustments to phrasing. In the second piece, he set up an extraordinary double-handed, rapidly corrugating sheet of sound, hitting the keys like a bongo-pianist.
This was a unique musical experience which drew an eclectic crowd though, surprisingly since this was a Birmingham Jazz gig, few jazz regulars.
4/5
Peter Bacon
