Trouble Tune featuring Geiom, Bass Clef and the London Improvisers Orchestra, The Clore Ballroom, 22/11/09

It is just after lunchtime on the South Bank, and parents with young children are gathering inside in the Clore Ballroom for an afternoon of family-friendly entertainment. Which means sitting on a hard wooden floor while a bunch of the UK’s leading dubstep artists blast bass in their face. Of course. This Trouble Tune event was an imaginative extension to the London Jazz Festival, exploring the overlap between improvisation and this most vibrant of UK musical scenes, teaming Geion and Bass Clef with luminaries of the London Improvisers Orchestra. Follow this with a performance by Cluster and Tortoise in the Royal Festival Hall later in the same evening (review to follow), and you probably have the most inspired day of programming in the South Bank that I can remember.

Before we even reached the dubstep, there was much fun to be had in the ballroom. Matthew Yee-King (who I watched with jaw agape from behind the decks at an Icarus show earlier this year) teamed up with his masked Swedish counterpart Click Nilson for some live-coding mischief. Yee-King’s laptop screen was projected on the screen behind, demonstrating him tampering with his drum sounds, loops and beats in real time. To the side was a screen with another set of instructions for Nilson, including “run to the bar”, which he did obligingly, and some for a rather less biddable audience. The least biddable elements of all were the aforementioned children who danced (or rolled around the floor in some cases) with delight at the increasingly complex patterns Yee-King was creating. Until, that is, Yee-King cranked the BPM up to a nice round 20,000: cue the sight of half a dozen children shrieking in fright with their fingers in their ears.

This gave some indication of the musical storm which was about to follow. Nottingham-based dubstep artist Geiom warmed us some with a solo set of bewitching rhythms seemingly made from angular woodblock carvings. I’m no dubstep aficionado, far from it in fact, but this is the end of the genre to which I find myself increasingly drawn: percussion-led, sparse and yet full of inner complexities (see also the work of the similarly Asian-influenced Shackleton). These are the exact qualities which seemed to lend Geiom’s work perfectly to a set of abstract improvised jazz explorations.

I’m certain that the three musicians I’ve seen most often in the last twelve months are Jason Yarde, Shabaka Hutchings and – above all – the bass colossus John Edwards. And the reason I’ve seen them so often is undoubtedly a reflection both on their talent and on their ability to bend that talent to a variety of given situations. Edwards may be the UK’s premier bassist on the avant-garde scene, the go-to man for all manner of legendary improvisers, but I know for a fact he knows his way around the Mingus catalogue, and he can damn well swing when he wants. I’ve seen saxophonists Yarde and Hutchings make their presence felt in various group settings, from the urban to the astral. Add to this lap steel guitarist BJ Cole, who has previous in terms of collaborating with dance musicians (most notably Sting Luke Vibert), and Japanese multi-instrumentalist Kenichi, and you have a group that could do battle with just about anything that any young pioneer could throw at them.

Although they must have given Geiom the fright of his life when they hit him with some way-out drone turbulence, Edwards sawing away on arco bass, Yarde and Hutchings growling throatily amongst the murky gloom on stage. Gradually, Geiom found his way in, ensnaring the others in his wide-spaced rhythmic net, with the twin saxophonists coming together to sing a squiggly mantra, and Edwards climbing all over his instrument, dispensing inventive riffs and one-note bombs. Geiom kept the rhythmic tension building, unafraid by now to meet the others on their turf, and even to lead them onto more difficult terrain – heading them up towards a stunning free-blowing crescendo. This ranks as one of the most intense live experiences I’ve had all year, and yet was a slightly surreal experience, given the venue and the time of day. Someone should book this group to play in a club NOW; I’ll be first in the queue for a ticket.

Bass Clef’s style is noticeably different to Geiom’s (even to me): less percussive, and more driven by big, fat funky low frequencies. It felt like Geiom approached his art from the electronic musician end of the dubstep spectrum, and Bass Clef from the DJ end, with them almost – but not quite – meeting in the middle. Over samples of old records Bass Clef added theremin, woodblocks, whistle and even trombone, at times adding a big dubby echo to the instruments. The more melodic elements contrived to give his set a more song-like feel, and this continued into the ensemble piece, creating a whole new challenge for the improvisers.

In huge contrast to the set with Geiom, this felt almost unimprovised, even rehearsed. True enough, Edwards had to find his own way to make an impact amongst the huge ecstatic groove that Bass Clef was hammering out, and this often meant some lateral thinking (a repeated, almost feminine string wail sounded like a vocal loop in a garage track). But elsewhere the approach was more structured, less free. Massed horn riffs appeared almost fully-formed, with Bass Clef sitting in on trombone, themes appearing and reappearing throughout. So accomplished was this that he only clue that this wasn’t pre-prepared came at the end when Bass Clef was panicked by a watch-tapping member of the crew into an unexpectedly abrupt descent, leaving the rest of the group to pick their own way down from the heights they had scaled at their own pace.

After a couple of hours of such rich and fulfilling music, it was time to strip it all back to source: Appleblim, Shackleton’s partner in the formidable Skull Disco enterprise, playing in front of grainy, monochrome footage of Bristol. The minimal percussive material he began with was sublime, especially a long mazy slice of zither-dominated dubstep, and before long people were dancing. Of course, it being the ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall, this meant that middle class white women were dancing like fairies in front of vaguely embarrassed men with their shirts tucked into their jeans, but still: people were dancing. Dancing to some serious dubstep, in the early evening, in London’s biggest arts complex. This had been an event which made new links, made new fans, made children cry, and made a big statement about this music’s cultural significance. More please.

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