jazz blog

A collaboration between the improvising piano trio Bourne/Davis/Kane and saxophonist Paul Dunmall is to be released on Babel Records, the London label, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, has confirmed.

Dunmall and B/D/K are far from strangers and recorded together in 2008 for the album Moment to Moment performing together many times over the years. Drummer Steve Davis and bassist Dave Kane with Dunmall go even further back, recording Clown for the Essex-based FMR label recorded in 2001 while pianist Matthew Bourne came to Dunmall’s music separately, possibly through pianist Keith Tippett.

Bourne/Davis/Kane premiered composer Piers Hellawell’s ‘Sound Carvings, Strange Tryst’ at the Brilliant Corners festival in March, the Belfast premiere coming in a year when the piece, the score of which has just been published, forms part of the first PRS for Music Foundation New Music Biennial, with the next concert on Saturday in Aberdeen  to be followed by appearances at London’s Southbank Centre and in Glasgow during the Commonwealth Games this summer.

Hellawell’s work in a way reimagined the trio through this new composition, Davis indicating that there were elements of the trio’s 2010-released album The Money Notes conveyed within the piece. “Piers was not afraid to write melody,” Davis says, still a bit jetlagged after returning from recording in New York with pianist Kris Davis and trumpeter Ralph Alessi for an album to feature the Human drummer’s own music.

Working at Michael Brorby’s Brooklyn studio Acoustic Recording Steve Davis has had a connection with Kris Davis through saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock who the drummer had worked with in London. Kris had heard and liked Davis’ work with B/D/K and the project took a step forward when the pianist suggested the drummer get in touch with Alessi who joined the pair in the studio during his brief visit to New York. The album will be mixed in London later in the year, the project coming together partly as a consequence of Davis receiving a prestigious Arts Council of Northern Ireland award one of four artists announced earlier this year, the £15,000 award providing Davis with the opportunity to collaborate with other artists in New York and London.

In the autumn Davis’ acclaimed improv band Human (with Dylan Bates, Alex Hawkins and Alex Bonney) will gig again and conduct masterclasses. But before that Bourne/Davis/Kane are in Belfast tomorrow to perform at a free entry concert that follows a Translating Improvisation: Beyond Disciplines, Beyond Borders colloquium at Queen’s University’s Sonic Arts Research Centre where discussions about the possibility of translating musical improvisation across the humanities engaging with improvisation as a social practice will also be held. Stephen Graham

Matthew Bourne, above left, Steve Davis, and Dave Kane