The Brice is Right
BEN THOMPSON
Released in 2022 on the resonantly named West Hill record label, double bass virtuoso Olie Brice’s Fire Hills – a double CD for trio and octet – has a good claim to being the most potent selection of site-specific jazz ever to come out of East Sussex. Time was when the Arts Council was constantly bankrolling people like Stan Tracey to make slightly half-arsed concept albums about the High Weald, but those days are sadly long gone, and the intensity of Brice’s musical love letter to Fairlight’s breeziest beauty spot testifies to a cultural landscape in which if you’re doing it, you’re doing it for love.
With pieces dedicated to (and implicitly referencing the work of) inspirational jazz figures Johnny Dyani, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill, Fire Hills is definitely at the composed end of Brice’s broad creative spectrum. But those who know him best as co-curator of Hastings’ regular (and ever more popular) Two Ship nights of purely improvised music should not be put off. Esteemed jazz critic (and erstwhile Old Grey Whistle Test presenter) Richard Williams has written of Brice’s “ability to use his role as a composer to guide rather than prescribe”, and fans will finally get the chance to judge for themselves when the trio featured on the album (Brice on bass, Will Glaser on drums and Tom Challenger on tenor sax) makes its belated home town debut in the back room of the Pig this Friday night.
“I don’t personally feel like there’s a very big difference between playing completely improvised music, and projects like my trio where there’s loads of room for improvisation but there is some pre-composed material”, Brice explains. “In both cases you’re developing material, listening to the people you’re playing with and the vibrations in the room, drawing on all the music you’ve listened to and played in the past – it’s just that in freely improvised performances you have to generate the material spontaneously.”
The way improvising musicians communicate is a topic of great fascination to non-combatants. I wonder does he use physical signals to suggest to fellow players the direction he feels things should be going in, the same way that on Match of the Day they’ll talk about Arsenal’s captain Martin Odegaard fiddling with his sock on the edge of the area just before a corner, to let his team mates know if it’s going to be a short one or a long one?
“There’s nothing like that, no”, Brice laughs. “To be honest, I normally have my eyes shut when I’m playing – everything is completely improvised and in the moment – so even if someone was frantically gesturing at me to stop, I probably wouldn’t know about it”.
Brice will have no worries about fellow musicians frenziedly drawing their index fingers across their throats when he returns to improvising duty at the next Two Ship at The Nest on 16 February, because it’s a solo double bass performance, alongside Hastings’ very own godfather of free music Trevor Watts (who also plays in a power trio format with John Edwards on bass and Tolled Ostvang on drums). “I love solo double bass – both as a player and a listener”, he enthuses of a set-up which will be new to many listeners, citing Dave Holland’s Emerald Tears and Barre Phillips’ Journal Violone as classics of the genre, and emphasizing that “it’s an instrument where a lot of the complexity and subtlety can easily be lost when there’s other stuff going on”.
Among the other stuff going on in the backroom of the Pig will be the fifth ever gig by all star (and all caps) St Leonards post-punk trio BEAU (featuring fiery troubadour Otti Albietz, Borough Council’s Haydn Ackerley, and gallerist/tub thumper Colden Drystone). They’re an unusual booking as support act for a jazz show, but one Brice is fully behind – “I think BEAU are fantastic; when I first heard them they made me think of (US alt-rock pioneers) The Minutemen. I’ve always liked combining different genres on bills,” Brice continues. “My first gigging experiences – both as promoter and playing gigs – were in the DiY scene that grew out of punk, and I’ve always been into that approach, politically and practically.…”.
The Olie Brice Trio play the backroom of the Pig with BEAU and DJ Fritz Catlin on Friday 2 February. You can also hear Olie talking about his music on an hour-long edition of The London Ear on www.resonancefm.com at 4.30pm on Saturday 3 February
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