Funking Poets
One Day
(Gramophone Records GR1509CD)

FUNKING POETS is a co-operative band of largely veteran musicians, most of whom are now retired from the un-musical jobs they have done throughout their working lives.

It was the influential free drummer Jon Stevens who brought trumpeter Paul Shearsmith (he also plays trombone and “baliphone,” brought home from Indonesia in 1983) and drummer Robin Musgrave together in the early ’70s when Stevens regularly assembled many free jazz spirits at London’s Little Theatre Club and played weekly sessions at The Plough in Stockwell, with other brilliant confreres like pianist Stan Tracey, trumpeter Harry Beckett, altoist Mike Osborne and bassist Harry Miller.

Musgrave often drove a frequently hard-up Stevens and his drum set to gigs, and Shearsmith tells how the drummer taught him to improvise on the desperate trumpet he bought in a second-hand shop and took to Little Theatre sessions.

Both 70-year-old Shearsmith and saxophonist Mike Walter (68) worked in architecture firms, bassist Jerry Bird is a carer, Musgrave a lorry driver and the band’s junior member, whose funky guitar sound persuaded them to change their name from OneKing to Funking Poets is 40 -year-old Morris Masuda, a possessional cartoonist.

I asked Shearsmith what other influences primed their music. “The BBC Sound Effects Library,” he replied. I used to listen to their sounds when I was a boy and wanted them in the heart of our music.”

One Day is the Funking Poets’ new album, with the majority of its tracks’ titles made up of naked verbs and participles. The sonic action starts with Winding. It’s a haunting worrisome sound with Walter’s synthesizer creating a long, seemingly endless note, and the BBC sound effects influences are immediately apparent, as if the early-days Dr Who has stepped into free jazz and Telstar is making its ring around the Earth, and coming closer again in 2017.

Masuda’s guitar stomps out a chomping rhythm. Curling finds Musgrave’s drum beset by a flying, satellite sound like some metallic interplanetary insect before Masuda’s calming chords.

Coiling begins with some funky guitar over Musgrave’s powerful drums.

Walter’s soprano saxophone joins the intensity and Shearsmith’s trumpet as the pulse adds pace. Bend strikes up a warm groove with soprano, Bird’s emphatic bass and Musgrave’s darkly crashing beat. Ian Dean’s organ adds to the rhythmic undertow.  

The smarting brass kisses of Shearsmith’s horn rail through Curve, and in Dorothy, Walter’s loquacious tenor and Musgrave’s drum share a duo palaver.

Fire is a free blow by the two horns with pounding drums and a resonating Bird close to the earth. Through the longest track, Turning, Bird’s plucking fingers create a dance of deep strings with Masuda’s guitar calls imploring an answer. The horns join in and the studio’s echo city creates it’s own world of sound, with Walter’s singing soprano and Shearsmith’s crackling horn testifying.

The final track is Laiking, which — as Yorkshireman Shearsmith remembers from his boyhood days in Tadcaster — is a verb which means “playing about,” which is exactly what these five musicians are doing together with their instruments in a studio called The Cowshed.

Shearsmith tells a story of calling on the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin in his home city Hull, now the city of culture, and inviting him out to “laik,” which despite his mother’s disapproval, he accepts.

“Laiking” is a marvellous use of a regional verb to express a jazz context.

Can you imagine Armstrong “laiking” with his teenage confreres at their New Orleans orphanage? Or Billie Holiday “laiking” with Lester Young and Buck Clayton as they played When You’re Smiling? Or Ellington “laiking” around at the Cotton Club? Charlie Parker “laiking” with Dizzy Gillespie as he dived into Now’s the Time? Or didn’t Stevens and his British pioneers of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble do their own way of “laiking” at the Little Theatre Club in those ’70s days which Shearsmith and Musgrave recall so vividly?

“Laiking” is the word and the groove, “laiking” is the message.