George Nelson’s “Moment’s Notice”

From an uncertain silence, one solitary note emerges, becoming a chord, its branches spreading into a kind of dub-infused forest. A flute, cymbals and what sound to me like Santa’s sleigh bells peek from behind the foliage. A form begins to find itself. No one knows what will happen next, least of all those on stage who only know that at some point, something must. These musicians may never have met before, let alone played together (or should those priorities be the other way around?). Their developing connection, and that of all the bands who have been involved in this series of gigs, is played out in front of consistently sold-out audiences in Amp Studios in the Old Kent Road, South London.

Music is, they say, a universal language. This seems, to me at least, to be completely untrue (…shoot me down in the comments, happy to indulge a fight!). It’s surely an omnipresent part of any culture. But there is no guarantee that anyone will understand either Fela Kuti or Ricard Strauss if their experiences favour plainchant or Gagaku. So every musician comes with their own tastes, preferences, emotionally cherished processes of interacting with others. Like a conversation between strangers, eventually they’ll find their way on to common ground. Unlike conversation, there is neither any explicit meaning nor any guarantee of an overlap. There is no topic like British weather or school catchment areas to cluster around. The whole thing runs on trust, faith, and perhaps here and there a little luck. And skill…don’t forget skill. Because drum fills launched hopeful in the knowledge they will land, or melodies looking hopefully for some chords, will always find a way out, in or through the music when in the right hands.

And now some of these encounters are destined for release, initially on vinyl only (and later for digital release) on the Red Dust record label, the latest venture from the wonderfully industrious, supremely knowledgable and engagingly affable George Nelson, the gig’s curator. “Moment’s Notice”, a series of initial one-off meetings between musicians, taps a rich mixture of scenes, ages, races and genders all intent on making each other sound as good as possible. In some ways, the gigs are theatrical events, the initial hesitant shuffle to the stage transforming, in the heat of the music, into new found camaraderies and associations. I’ve done it myself a couple of times. It leaves you with a warm sense of community and friendship that is by no means as common in music as you might think. (For that alone, this series of gigs is a gift). And George keeps going: he’s done 36 of these over three seasons, always finding new combinations of musicians. This is not a posh pop-up Peckham juice bar: it’s a serious ongoing commitment. His charismatically persuasive compering adds to the drama, and it feels right, because this is an almost evangelical task. To be in the audience is to believe in communal music making.

So the decision to release music from these concerts demands that we appreciate the music on its own terms. That’s a good thing. We all want to know if what we played on the gig, what felt good at the time, that music the audience clapped and whooped for….we want to know if it’s actually any good.

The first release, titled “44:42” after its duration, highlights the task its musicians faced…Three Quarters of an Hour of Making Things Up Together is no easy task. There are regular moments of “what now?” that require someone to step forward and suggest something. These three musicians make it sound natural, and are a typically representative line up for these events. Drummer Will Glaser is someone I’ve played with a lot, flautist and saxophonist Tamar Osborn I haven’t seen for years, and Yohannes Kebede is a keyboardist I have never heard before. They haven’t played together before, and they will have to figure it out.

Listen to them doing just that. Halfway through Side A, Glaser’s shifting rhythms seem for a while to be deliberately derailing the efforts of Osborn and Kebede to steer the music into a more dance-like territory. The process of his agreement to that proposition, the withholding of its resolution, is what gives this music its urgency. Because we want this tension. It’s a family drama at the dinner table made audible, but with a spirit of mutual acquiescence, that the essential meaning of this music, perhaps all music, lies not in the literal, the spilt milk and the family feuds, but in a purer conflict like that between atoms, breaking off and recombining without the tyranny of the test tube. These conflicts are fun, and as musicians we seek them out.

(If you feel that way about family get togethers, seek help).

Side B begins almost like an Art Ensemble gig, but Yohannes Kebede’s sound world (where resonance, delay and reverb put us literally in another room) make this combination fresh and invigorating. Tamar Osborn eventually wades in with a powerful bassline, the audience audibly excited by the prospect. Everyone jumps on, and there are moments later on where everyone in the group has the same idea at once. This is more common in improvised music than you might think, as if three people with shovels just dug up the same treasure chest.

The way this music slips between moods, it’s as if they had been planned all along. However, as a member of the audience, there’s always one giveaway. Even improvised music needs an ending, and the seeking out of that closure has its own peculiar magic, an awkwardness that ascends towards a moment of beauty. The looks that float across the bandstand as sounds trail off into what is not yet silence, and a thought you can almost see…“Is this the end?”