137: Strangeness Oscillation

More comebacks than Sinatra? Well, not really, given that this is the first one, but the return of the beyond-category British saxophonist and flautist Larry Stabbins after an eleven-year absence is headline news. In 2013, Stabbins (a.k.a. Stonephace) very publicly announced that he was beyond disgusted with the music business in general and the jazz business in particular and that he was leaving London and returning to the West Country where he was born and bred. We would be hearing no more from him on record or on stage.

"The music scene has changed drastically over the last 50 years and the cultural role of jazz is entirely different," wrote Stabbins in the core passage of the press statement announcing his retirement. "It attracted me when I began playing because it was rebellious, alternative, had a veneer of danger to it (drugs and debauchery) and it identified with the underdog (black people in racist societies) and had a generally anti-rightwing, anti-authoritarian political agenda. It also felt groundbreaking and exploratory. None of that seems to me to apply any more either to jazz or its spin-offs, such as improvised music. (I think I prefer Flying Lotus for the groundbreaking exploratory stuff)."

Many people could identify with Stabbins' sentiments , but—and hindsight is a wonderful thing—his timing was not so great. Less than two years after he quit, the British jazz scene was being refreshed, overhauled and rebooted by a new generation of musicians, many of them Black, personified by tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. Increasingly from 2015, an influential section of British jazz was once more anti-rightwing, anti-authoritarian, groundbreaking and exploratory. And the sources of inspiration for this new generation of players? Stabbins was among them.

Strangeness Oscillation picks up almost where Stabbins left off. The album is in a direct line of descent from 2009's Stonephace (Tru Thoughts), an electronica-infused set made in collaboration with West Country trip hoppers Portishead's guitarist Adrian Utley. That was "almost" where Stabbins left off because the final album he released prior to his retirement was Transcendental (Noetic, 2012), a more in-the-tradition acoustic affair featuring the great British/Bengali pianist Zoe Rahman. This kicked off with a rousing recalibration of "Africa," the John Coltrane tune which had ignited Stabbins' enthusiasm for jazz when he first heard it at the age of 13. Stabbins at the time clearly intended Transcendental to be his swan song, completing the circle as it were.

Utley returns for Strangeness Oscillation. Stabbins refers to the 137 band—a quartet completed by drummer Sebastian Rochford and bassist Jim Barr (another Portishead player)—as a "post jazz art rock band." It is a blast of fresh air, oscillating between tripped out and plugged in tenor saxophone wildness and gentler, more reflective flute-led tracks. Despite Stabbins' thumbnail description, it is jazz. But it is also rock. And it most definitely is art. As for what made Stabbins return from eleven years out of sight, who knows. The important thing is that he is back. Hooray!

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