Matt Ridley’s Antidote at Jazz Hastings
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Watching this highly co-ordinated jazz performance, it’s difficult to imagine that the musicians don’t spend all their time together writing, playing, and living the tunes. But the members of Matt Ridley’s outfit all have individual musical careers, long experience, and endless versatility. Together they form a powerful unit. Yet the Hastings gig was only the third for this new line-up, The Antidote. While Ridley’s previous band made two albums bearing the Antidote title, it now refers primarily to the music – “an antidote,”he remarks, “to jazz so abstruse that it can alienate the listener, while it doesn’t pander to the merely popular.”
The distinctive combination of very personal styles certainly makes for some intricacy. Rory Simmons’ trumpet was necessarily much in evidence, compensating that evening for the unavoidable absence of Mark Lockheart’s saxophone. Simmons’ playing is fast, fluid, and uncompromising – a mellowish tone from what looks like a vintage instrument, and a highly exploratory improvisational style. Ivo Neame’s piano is key to the band’s unique sound: there’s a complexity about what he does with any tune that lifts it truly out of the ordinary.
Ridley’s tunes aren’t ordinary anyway. He himself plays a distinctive, antique upright bass. Coupled with Dave Ingamells’ careful drum patterning, the music is driven unhesitatingly forward, sometimes in unlikely time signatures – a characteristic Ridley may have absorbed from his long-term presence in Darius Brubeck’s band.
All the evening’s material was Ridley’s own, apart from a fast, driving version of the Thelonious Monk standard I Mean You. It remains a continual wonder that jazz standards like this one are now 80 years old, others more than a century, yet can always be newly-made. Monk’s familiar structure and bebop chords have been worked and reworked by countless bands, but the trademark style of this band rendered it yet again modern, distinctive.
Contemporary British jazz, while it acknowledges and incorporates the music’s American roots, adds European influences sometimes coupled with a modern classical approach. Matt Ridley’s Antidote is a prime example.
Matt Ridley’s Antidote played at Jazz Hastings on Tuesday 2 June. After the summer break the club re-opens in a brand-new incarnation at Barnaby’s Jazz Lounge on Robertson Street.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply