A BEACON of British jazz and improvised music, Orphy Robinson was born in Dalston, east London, in 1960 which, with venues like Cafe Oto and the Vortex, is now the epicentre of free music in the capital.

 
His reggae-loving Jamaican household meant he grew up with soul, reggae and “a jazz-funk hybrid” in his ears, and he learned recorder, piano, tuned percussion and trumpet by his early teens. His father’s record collection caused him to listen closely to the vibes of Lionel Hampton and Roy Ayers, and Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy had a particular compulsion for him.

He was tutored by the Hackney & Islington Youth Band, where his most powerful influence was South African trumpeter Claude Deppa. “He was open to all music,” he tells me, “and I followed him to many concerts, including free improvisation, big band and South African gigs.”
 
He remembers a workshop session in Newington Green run by the free-jazz drummer John Stevens. “It was only years later that I realised who he was. At the time he was just a bloke who ran a fun music workshop!”

Robinson played with Jazz Warriors through the 1980s and by 1993 the hugely prestigious US Blue Note label released two of his albums, When Tomorrow Comes (1993) and The Vibes Describes (1994).

But his most challengingly powerful musical relationship is with pianist and fellow electronics wizard Pat Thomas and their duo Black Top, formed in 2012. “We found we shared many musical influences, histories and nuances,” he says of their hugely empathetic and creative partnership. “We especially enjoyed the hybrid of digital and acoustic music from across the African diaspora.”

Their new double album, recorded at Cafe Oto in 2019, is Some Good News, and on it he and Thomas are supplemented by Louisiana drummer Hamid Drake, New York bassist William Parker and east London vocalist Elaine Mitchener.

The pair first played with Drake and Parker at the 2015 Santa Anna Aresi Festival in  Sardinia, where “we connected on an intellectual and spiritual level and decided to keep in contact and do something as a quartet. Elaine joined us at the 2019 Cafe Oto quintet concert. The versatility of her voice complemented immediately the influences and areas that the musical proceedings took.”

Some Good News is a continuously astonishing record. Its sounds are unique, with Parker’s great earthen bass rising from the stone-clad Cafe Oto floor and his three-stringed camel-skin bass guimbri, used by Moroccan Gnawa musicians, adding deep African utterance and timbre to Thomas’s lucid, bell-like piano notes.

Drake’s stormy drums are often tender, while Mitchener’s wordlessly beautiful voice meshes with Robinson’s marimba and Thomas’s wailing and fizzing electronics. It's a meeting of different continents, with opposites and musical paradoxes finding a long-sought unity.

“I hope when listening to the music, you would find some optimism alongside realism as we interpret and work together to find answers to compelling questions going forward,” says Robinson.

Post-pandemic, Black Top’s plans are to get as much music released as possible — “there’s a mountain of recordings in our vaults that needs to be heard — and to play to live audiences again.

“This period is like a reset, and I really appreciate how fortunate we have been to live this life.”