When Alas No Axis headlined the opening night of the town's second annual Jazz Festival at the Royal Hotel last Friday, the audience got more than it bargained for. Led by the magnificent young drummer Jim Black, this New York-based quartet offered a taste of the kind of cutting-edge music to be heard on the Big Apple's contemporary jazz scene.
All the elements of the music, especially time and harmony - or what vestigial facets of it remained - were handled with remarkable freedom in pursuit of sounds and textures which seemed to owe as much to Balkan folk music as to jazz and rock. Perhaps some of this is the influence of trumpeter Dave Douglas, in whose Tiny Bell Trio Black first came to notice here. Whatever the reason, it resulted in an absorbing blend at the hands of a beautifully knit group completed by Chris Speed on tenor and clarinet and the Icelanders Hilmar Jensson on guitar and Skuli Sverisson on six-string bass guitar and laptop - a device also used by the leader to provide electronic backdrops to the quartet's richly diverse arsenal of sounds.
Theirs is essentially an ensemble music, much of it of an elegiac cast with occasional splashes of fury - typified by Ambacharm, Poet Staggered and Garden Frequency, all by Black - and hardly anything that would have been recognised as a solo. Given their unfettered approach to sound, the potential for chaos and self-indulgence was great, but - despite the group's title - there was an undeniable sense of focus and control about their work, the fulcrum shifting at times to clarinet/guitar or bass/tenor lines, or simply to repeated phrases on either tenor or clarinet, while the other instruments took wing.
Most of all, however, the thread that knit together this impressive music was the superb, utterly individual drumming of the leader. Black is a one-off, a great drummer who has forged a unique style out of a range of idiomatic influences, and one who, despite a technical command that was absolute, was always prepared to abandon the strictly correct to get the sounds he wanted. Both he and his group made for a totally compelling opening to the festival. No axis? Don't you believe it.
