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Sunny Murray/John Edwards/Tony Bevan
I Stepped Onto A Bee
Foghorn Records FGCD-014
CD
£12.99
There’s not many players in the UK that you’d be comfortable to see going face-to-face with the original detonator of time, Mr Sunny Murray. His CV reads like an extended chapter of As Serious As Your Life and in that kinda light it’s maybe only Hession/Wilkinson/Fell that could hold up their side of the energy/form equation on this isle. But the applied firepower of bassist John Edwards – still the wildest and most consistently ‘out’ of four-string thinkers in the UK – and tenor saxophonist Tony Bevan blows away any trepidation. Murray has been working with these guys as his ‘UK group’ for a while and anyone who has encountered this blazing trio live can speak for the wall-destroying force they regularly bring to improvised performance. I Stepped Onto A Bee is a gloriously rendered studio performance recorded in London in August of 2010 and features six all-improvised performances. Bevan’s tone is fat and Trane-reverent, playing strong bluesy lines that crack and strain at the very limits of his breath. Murray’s style is still massively radical, taking his explosive scattershot snare and cymbal style into loose pugilistic shapes while accelerating and decelerating at will, with Edwards sliding all over the time signatures while Bevan steps out front and really lets it sing. I Stepped Onto A Bee is positioned right on the cusp of punk-primitive free improvisation and classic late-60s free jazz iconoclasm and that’s a damn fine place to be.
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