TONY OXLEY - February Papers
DISCUS: 99CD/DL
Tony Oxley: percussion, electronics, violin; Barry Guy - double bass, bass guitar; Philipp Wachsmann – violin; David Bourne – violin; Ian Brighton - electric guitar
Recorded February 1977 by Keith Spencer-Allen and Vangelis Papathanassiou at Hampden Gurney Studios, London
There can be very few aspects of the shaping of experimental modern jazz in Britain untouched by Tony Oxley. From his time as the in-house drummer for Ronnie Scott’s club in the mid to late ‘60s to the founding of Incus records (with Derek Bailley, Evan Parker and Mike Walters) in 1969 and his time in Joseph Holbrooke (with Derek Bailey and Gavin Bryars), he has steered an individual course away from the mainstream, never seeming to engage in the unfathomable. In part, his enthusiasm for sticking microphones on any part of the drumkit (and other objects) and then playing with the ways in which electronic mixing and effects could distort and modify the concept of a drum sound, and in part, his ability to combine many rhythmic pulses into the ‘pulse’ that he injects into any piece he plays now seem prescient and shape the ways in which all manner of percussion has a (to be fair, often unacknowledged) debt to his ideas. He continues to record, even in his 82nd year, releasing the well-received ‘Beaming’ this year (where his experiments in electronics are to the fore and Stefan Holker handles the percussion).
This set is a reissue of an album released in 1977. This was a time when I was solely into Punk and had no time for any other form of music. And yet, if I had played this album to my younger self, I would have probably been overwhelmed by the experimentation here. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, so much of the novelty of Punk was the reclothing of riffs from the Kinks, the Yardbirds and Tommy Steele (if you don’t get the last one… try listening to the Clash singing ‘London Calling’ but replace the opening words with ‘I never felt more like singing the blues…). But what you get on this set continues to sound unplaceable, with Barry Guy’s odd assortment of sounds from his bass on ‘Qaurtet 1’ which opens this set, and Oxley matching his oddness with a panoply of alien sounds from his kit. There is in this set far more the spirit of rebellion, over turning shibboleths and just sticking two fingers up to any old establishment than Punk had even dreamed of. That this set was recorded in the studio of his friend Vangelis, one of the ‘70s pioneers of electronica, is all the more interesting and I’m sure there’s a story as to how Vangelis and Oxley made sense of each other’s approaches to the use of electronics and effects (particular when so much of the sounds that were created relied both of the musician’s skills, analogue equipment and nascent digital effects).
The pieces are credited to Oxley and (just like his most recent release) build in ‘frames’. This has the advantage of giving compositional structure but allowing plenty of space for interventions by other musicians. In the case of pieces such as ‘Sounds of the Soil’ (track 2) or ‘Brushes’ (track 3), the ‘other’ musicians are Oxley himself working his way around the amplified collection of objects in his ‘drum kit’. This is a set that Discus has done us all a great service in reissuing (with Oxley supervising the production) and which easily stands shoulder-to-shoulder with contemporary noise-scape artists, pre-empting them by several decades but continuing to sound as new, as challenging and as exciting as ever. This stands as a testament to a time when no rules applied to music, where free improvisation sought to challenge every convention and yet, where a drummer schooled in all styles of jazz was able to produce a set of compositions that have the rigour and logic of composed music.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
DISCUS: 99CD/DL
Tony Oxley: percussion, electronics, violin; Barry Guy - double bass, bass guitar; Philipp Wachsmann – violin; David Bourne – violin; Ian Brighton - electric guitar
Recorded February 1977 by Keith Spencer-Allen and Vangelis Papathanassiou at Hampden Gurney Studios, London
There can be very few aspects of the shaping of experimental modern jazz in Britain untouched by Tony Oxley. From his time as the in-house drummer for Ronnie Scott’s club in the mid to late ‘60s to the founding of Incus records (with Derek Bailley, Evan Parker and Mike Walters) in 1969 and his time in Joseph Holbrooke (with Derek Bailey and Gavin Bryars), he has steered an individual course away from the mainstream, never seeming to engage in the unfathomable. In part, his enthusiasm for sticking microphones on any part of the drumkit (and other objects) and then playing with the ways in which electronic mixing and effects could distort and modify the concept of a drum sound, and in part, his ability to combine many rhythmic pulses into the ‘pulse’ that he injects into any piece he plays now seem prescient and shape the ways in which all manner of percussion has a (to be fair, often unacknowledged) debt to his ideas. He continues to record, even in his 82nd year, releasing the well-received ‘Beaming’ this year (where his experiments in electronics are to the fore and Stefan Holker handles the percussion).
This set is a reissue of an album released in 1977. This was a time when I was solely into Punk and had no time for any other form of music. And yet, if I had played this album to my younger self, I would have probably been overwhelmed by the experimentation here. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, so much of the novelty of Punk was the reclothing of riffs from the Kinks, the Yardbirds and Tommy Steele (if you don’t get the last one… try listening to the Clash singing ‘London Calling’ but replace the opening words with ‘I never felt more like singing the blues…). But what you get on this set continues to sound unplaceable, with Barry Guy’s odd assortment of sounds from his bass on ‘Qaurtet 1’ which opens this set, and Oxley matching his oddness with a panoply of alien sounds from his kit. There is in this set far more the spirit of rebellion, over turning shibboleths and just sticking two fingers up to any old establishment than Punk had even dreamed of. That this set was recorded in the studio of his friend Vangelis, one of the ‘70s pioneers of electronica, is all the more interesting and I’m sure there’s a story as to how Vangelis and Oxley made sense of each other’s approaches to the use of electronics and effects (particular when so much of the sounds that were created relied both of the musician’s skills, analogue equipment and nascent digital effects).
The pieces are credited to Oxley and (just like his most recent release) build in ‘frames’. This has the advantage of giving compositional structure but allowing plenty of space for interventions by other musicians. In the case of pieces such as ‘Sounds of the Soil’ (track 2) or ‘Brushes’ (track 3), the ‘other’ musicians are Oxley himself working his way around the amplified collection of objects in his ‘drum kit’. This is a set that Discus has done us all a great service in reissuing (with Oxley supervising the production) and which easily stands shoulder-to-shoulder with contemporary noise-scape artists, pre-empting them by several decades but continuing to sound as new, as challenging and as exciting as ever. This stands as a testament to a time when no rules applied to music, where free improvisation sought to challenge every convention and yet, where a drummer schooled in all styles of jazz was able to produce a set of compositions that have the rigour and logic of composed music.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
