Tom Jackson & Colin Webste — The Other Lies
The Other Lies is an angularly searing-to-gratingly droning ‘n’ warbling example of horn-based improv. It’s an album that rewardingly puts your teeth on edge and your sonic nerves through the grinder. It’s not in any way easy or safe, but if you’re after the sonic equivalent of root canal surgery, then this more that hit’s the spot!.
The release comes as a CD release on Antwerpen-based New Wave of Jazz- who solo focus on releasing the more difficult/ extreme side of improv and modern composition. It’s ltd to three hundred copies and can be purchased directly from here.
The album brings together two London-based players- Tom Jackson on Clarinet, and Colin Webster alto and baritone saxophones. The six tracks, each with run times between nine and thirteen minutes, were recorded in February of last year at Peckham Road Studios- and I’m sure some studio tiles were melted in the processes.
The sound throughout the album is very urgent and constricting, with never a minute of mellow release. We open with “I” this finds slowly pained waving drifts of horn sustains, which are both piercing highs and crackling grainy. As the track progresses the pair's rapid and searing interplay takes off, as they weave sourly baying and cheeky-yet-seared warbles around each other. “III” opens with a seemingly snake-biting-from-every-angle mixture of painfully compressed honk flits, constricting air pulls, and manically darting bays. Before later moving onto mixers of horn tap ‘n’ fiddle, and fraught snake charmer reels.
By “V” we find sudden bass fiddles ‘n’ pipes, meeting forking and trumpeting. With the track later moving on to extremely pained drone inter-feeds, and mystic-yet-wonky honk trails. The album is finished off with “VI” which at first focuses on a hover ‘n’ deflating bays and watery warbles. With the track latter taking off into rapid and darting interplays, which often dip into the sour ‘n’ sharpe.
For those who enjoy sonically mining at the more intense and head-in-a-vice end of the improv genre, then The Other Lies will be most a painfully pleasing treat….really pushing things way into the fiery & red.