_{Black Top, # One with Special Guest Steve Williamson,  Babel **** RECOMMENDED}

I

attended the concert captured on # One with Special Guest Steve Williamson recorded at the opening night concert of Jazz in the Round at the Cockpit theatre in London's Marylebone on 30 January 2012 and the album is a vivid souvenir of that excellent performance. Black Top was initiated in the latter part of 2011 by Jazz Warrior and multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson and pianist/sound sculptor Pat Thomas, and the group appears in different formations, with Steve Williamson guesting here (Williamson and Thomas had appeared as support to Steve Coleman’s Reflex a few months before at the London Jazz Festival). “Exploring the intersection between live instruments and lo-fi technology combining twisted loops, samples, dub-effects that draw on their Afro-Caribbean roots with the spirit of pure improvisation which is rooted in the free jazz experiments of NYC musicians like Sam Rivers,” according to the band. ‘There Goes the Neighbourhood’, with its Space Invaders-like bespoke keyboard sounds bubbling up from the Cecil Taylor-esque imagination of Thomas, brooding marimba density from Robinson and tender soprano saxophone lines from Williamson, who hasn’t been heard properly on record for years, is the 13 minute-plus opener; with the abstract hugely long ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’ (a nod perhaps in its title to the 1950s Stanley Kramer film starring Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier) coming in like velvet via an a cappella Robinson beginning, Thomas later funnelling wild octave-trampling sheets of sound on what essentially is an extravagant ballad and the most startling achievement of this superb album. ‘Archaic Nubian StepDub’, the short closer, with Thomas’ zappy sci-fi keyboard lasering the opening before Williamson’s Gary Bartz-like tones give Robinson a feast for thought. That’s improvising. Stephen Graham
This is a slightly edited version of a previously published review of #One... that appeared in Marlbank earlier this year