The Eclecticism of Afrit Nebula
KEITH RODWAY, festival organiser, musician, and documentary filmmaker, explores the diverse influences of local band Afrit Nebula.
Ken and Elaine Edwards have been active on the Hastings alternative music scene for almost 20 years. Their band, The Moors, was celebrated for its eclectic mix of rock, jazz and musical influences from Eastern Europe, the Balkans and elsewhere. When The Moors disbanded a few years ago, Afrit Nebula rose from the ashes.
Afrit Nebula (Ken and Elaine, working first with percussionist Jamie Harris and currently with Yair Katz) released their second album, Inalienable in May 2022, which draws on the work of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, Japanese ghost stories and Arabic and African scales and riffs. This was followed by Elaine’s Bulverhythe Variations, her response to her frequent visits in lockdown in 2020 to the stretch of coastline west of St Leonards. It resulted in an album of piano pieces and also a book of her photographs, with text by Ken.
Ken is a poet, a writer (four published novels) and a small press editor. He says of his burgeoning interest in music in the 1970s: “Perhaps as a result of being brought up in Gibraltar, I am very interested in the traditional musics of the southern Mediterranean. You can hear the same scales and rhythms in klezmer, in Sephardic Jewish music, in Turkish and Middle Eastern music and in the Balkans. In The Moors we tried to fuse that with our own rock traditions, and our own compositions. That has carried on into Afrit Nebula’s more jazz-like idiom.”
Elaine says of her early exposure to music: “My father played the clarinet in a local dance band in Norfolk and also played the accordion – sometimes entertaining people in the pub next door. I grew up hearing 1940s dance band music and classical piano music (my older brother was a brilliant pianist). I loved it all…
“I left school with few academic qualifications. In my mid-twenties in London I hired a flute. This put me on the musical and creative journey I’m still on. Outside of my job as a medical secretary, I learned how to play. I had a wonderful Irish flute teacher, adept in classical, jazz and Irish folk music, whom I visited once a week. He believed in a ‘baptism of fire’ approach – playing Bach duets for well over an hour a week and sometimes music by Miles Davis (later I went on to saxophone). Eventually I managed to be accepted onto a performance art degree in Chichester. It was a true garden of discovery – studying as a musician while relating music as a creative art form to dance, art and creative writing.”
The pair met at a contemporary music-making summer school in Yorkshire, then lived in London and eventually moved to Hastings. Elaine says: “We’ve been thrilled to work with some very creative and talented people over the years, both in our bands and in collaborations with other art forms.”
Afrit Nebula will be performing at the Beacon in Hastings on Thursday 27 July, with support from Hastings art-rock band Necessary Animals. For more information visitafritnebula.com
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