Anthropology Band
Cafe Oto
★★★★
Paul G Smyth, John Edwards and Mark Sanders
Vortex
★★★★
   

DALSTON, east London, was the epicentre of free musical marvels last week.

At Cafe Oto the Anthropology Band showed how wondrously electric and acoustic sounds can gel so creatively and with such acerbic unity.

Martin Archer’s searing soprano and guttural tenor saxophone; Pat Thomas’s nonplussing keyboards;  the combined electric guitars  of Chris Sharkey and Anton Hunter; Dave Sturt’s pulsating bass guitar: Orphy Robinson’s pounding mallets: the cascades of Adam Farclough’s drums and the visceral, breathy vibrato of the trumpet and flugelhorn of Charlotte Keeffe. It was a timbral stew to be earnestly savoured.

Built upon the inspirational memories of Miles Davis’s 1960s and 1970s electric ensembles, this band went several steps beyond On Give Me Back Some Truth, there were sudden changes of rhythm and speed as Thomas switched from piano to electric keyboard beside the maelstrom of Keeffe’s respiring choruses and Sharkey’s clanging volleys; a Niagra of notes and beautiful discord in the heart of London’s cosmos.

The night after at the Vortex just up the road, Mark Sanders ploughs his drums, his fingers, sticks and mallets ever-striking, caressing, tapping, stroking every adjacent surface; John Edwards saws his bass strings like an emboldened carpenter of sound and Irishman Paul G Smyth leans into his exposed piano strings, strumming and slapping them almost like a fervent child discovering a love for percussion for the very first time.

For the genius of their improvising means that it is the first and only time that such an amalgam of sounds are heard and they are irrepressible, unstoppable.

In this sense they are the heart of life and creation as the lightning of Smyth’s hands up and down the Vortex piano’s keys breaks all musical chains. The piano is no longer a box: it is a world.

And you need to watch as well as listen. It is where the dance of sounds is: bodies, brains and imaginations, troubadours who have become virtuosi. The sheer audacity of it: Edwards’ bow drawing fire at the extreme limit of his bass’s neck; Smyth’s sudden, enchanted lullaby of his softest chords; Sanders chopping on wooden blocks like an importunate woodpecker.

An awesome threesome indeed with their roots far afield in Ireland, Belize and Hounslow, London, making music of an awakened universe with the Caribbean people sounds of Gillett Square outside creating a true human accompaniment: the sonic heaven of Dalston.