Here’s the striking cover of Black Top’s debut Black Top #One, a live recording made on the opening night concert of Black Top with special guest Steve Williamson at the first of Jez Nelson’s now well established monthly club night Jazz in the Round at the Cockpit theatre, London, on 30 January last year. Three tracks, the long and absorbing ‘There Goes the Neighbourhood’, and ‘Guess Who's Coming to Dinner’, plus the shorter ‘Archaic Nubian StepDub’, are now available as a digital album with the physical release, Babel Records has now confirmed, set for 14 July 2014 during the London label’s twentieth anniversary year. Black Top as previously reported was initiated in the latter part of 2011 by Jazz Warrior and multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson and pianist/sound sculptor Pat Thomas conceived as a shape shifting ensemble, Black Top explores the intersection between live instruments and lo-fi technology. They combine twisted loops, samples, dub-effects that draw on their Afro-Caribbean roots and with the spirit of pure improvisation which is rooted in the free jazz experiments of NYC musicians such as Sam Rivers.
More on Black Top:
http://www.marlbank.net/news/1192-the-babel-label-signs-black-top