STEVE REID AND KIERAN HEBDEN- ARTIST PROFILE
March 27th, 2006 by rui
“My life changed the day we recorded the Exchange sessions. I couldn’t believe I was involved in making this music. It was such a revelation to be able to create improvised music with this epitome of African-American rhythmic drum tradition.” Kieran Hebden.
“I consider us to be pioneers, doing the electricity and the drums live. In the future this is going to be considered really important, but for now there’s just this.” Steve Reid.
When I talked to Kieran a couple of years back, about from where he drew inspiration, he demurred saying that he really couldn’t locate the sort of records he hoped would exist in the hinterlands of jazz, Krautrock and experimental electronic music. Since then, it seems – in addition to his ceaseless search for such illusive pearls – he’s decided to start making his own.
Steve Reid is the legendary drummer who in 1964 at 19 years of age played on Martha Reeves & the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’, and subsequently went on to play with Miles Davis, Fela Kuti and James Brown (think about that for a moment), not to mention Fats Domino, Sun Ra, Peggy Lee, Chaka Khan, Dexter Gordon, Dionne Warwick and many, many more.
Early in April this year, he went into The Exchange in Camden, London (where Kieran cuts his records) to extemporise with the young man from Four Tet. Wholly improvised, unedited and without overdubs, ‘The Exchange Session Vol 2’ is the second half of the real-time result of this fecund union.
“Everything is here. We were going to record the session and then put together the best bits into a definitive album,” says Kieran. “But we got excited by everything we put down and so decided to make it a complete document of that day. When you work with someone for the first time there is a naivete that will never be there again. We shot all the photos for the artwork the same day, just to keep it pure”
The two had played their first completely unscripted show in Paris 3 days previously and added a London show in between. In fact, it had all begun in Paris, with Kieran talking to Antoine from Paris Jazz Corner, about his love of American jazz duo records of the 70s. He loved the tension of the sax-drum collaborations between John Coltrane or Frank Lowe and Rashied Ali, and later British versions of the form with Evan Parker and John Stevens.
“They were getting really unexpected sounds from these traditional jazz instruments, and making them sound like Autechre records. I went to see a night of jazz duos at the Oslo Jazz Festival and decided I wanted to do something similar with electronic music, but take it forward to a completely new place” says Kieran.
Some months later Antoine turned up Steve Reid, who Kieran knew from his own Mustervic Sound Records label releases of the 70s and the re-release of ‘Nova’ on Soul Jazz. The two met late last autumn at the London Jazz Festival, where Steve expressed great enthusiasm for Kieran’s Four Tet work, which he had been sent by Paris Jazz Corner. A night of improvisation was arranged by Antoine for Paris in the spring, and suddenly things were happening in the real world.
“It has been so exciting for me because part of what I’ve wanted to do in my music – soul and funk and jazz, all the American music that I love – has been out of my reach. I’m used to making very controlled music where the computer keeps time. But I couldn’t do that because Steve has to keep time, so it was an incredible liberation,” says Kieran. He worked hard in advance of going in with Steve to find and create a new palette of “impossible computer sounds” to use in this new human way of working.
Steve: “To me the most important part is the improvisation. I’ve been playing for nearly 50 years and it has become more and more watered down. But what makes it possible is the rhythm, and, thankfully for me, we are living in a rhythmic age.” Steve considers the role of the pioneers who set the parameters of modern melody (Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Hendrix) to have been superceded by the need to succumb to the beat.
“When I started playing jazz the people used to dance to it, but then it started becoming cerebral. What is important for us now is keep music at the main source and take it back to the people. With all the fear and doubt in the world, people need good writing, good painting and good music. Art keeps the world in balance and synchronisation. When that goes out it’s like a spiritual death on the planet.”
Both men feel the joining of electronics and acoustic jazz has not really been handled very deftly in the past. Steve has issue with the whole idea of programmed beats in jazz (and has in the past campaigned against drum machines), while Kieran’s still looking for that quixotic blend of Alice Coltrane and Silver Apples.
“I consider Kieran to be a fantastic musician,” says Steve. “To some people he’s just an electronic guy, but I think he’s so much more than that. What he’s doing is playing a real instrument. The electronics takes on a black thing, if you know what I mean, which is something I don’t hear from the other guys.”
So what does it sound like? Well, that’s up to you and what you do with it. To me it is redolent of dark jungles alive with closely proximate animal and insect life, and arcane tribal ceremonies involving trance states and the probable ingestion of some ground-up psychedelic root blown up your nose from a hollow reed, while all around perspectives shift and shapes mutate in the endless green on green world. Sometimes a helicopter approaches the canopy, but it is never glimpsed. Colonel Kurtz may be doing bad things over the border in Laos. But, hey, that’s just me…
“Music is a feeling,” says Steve. It’s a spiritual process of bringing something from the unseen to the seen. We are not creating it, it is not my music, it belongs to the people.”
Press Quotes
“Hebden’s enduringly precocious musicality enables him to establish a profound connection with Reid’s compelling rhythmical back-story. And If there’s anyone out there who honestly believes that there’s noting new under the musical sun, well.. this album might just blow your mind” - OMM ****
“40 minutes of electric Miles Davis in miniature” - Sunday Times ****
“like psychedelic temple music, a mood that is both blissfully soothing and surging” - Times ****
“organic, preservative-and-additive-free, aural food straight from the farmers’ market” - Metro ****
“Thrillingly singular” - Independent ****
“An undeniable musical hunger and pioneering spirit at work” - Mojo ****
“indulgent but sporadically thrilling slice of electronic jazz that’s well worth sitting in on” - Independent On Sunday ****
