Easily the most adventurous and audacious outfit on today's
UK jazz scene, Led Bib has built a reputation over the course of seven albums
for expansive improvisations and treks into genre-defying music of throbbing
intensity. All Music Guide called their singular brand of jazz "explosive
enough to blow up your speakers" while The Wire weighed in with:
"This is the sound of a band having fun...like a hot chainsaw through
butter." For their RareNoiseRecords debut, the five-piece group from
London continues pushing the envelope on Umbrella Weather.
Fueled by
the muscular drumming of ringleader Mark Holub and the intense fuzz bass lines
of Liran Donin, further tweaked by atmospheric washes and crunchy keyboard
action from Toby McLaren and sparked by the pungent twin alto saxes of Peter
Grogan and Chris Williams, Led Bib stakes out a unique spot in the musical
terrain that falls somewhere between the realms of John Zorn, Ornette Coleman,
Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, all imbued with a very strong jazz-rock
sensitivity.
From the
odd-metered opener "Lobster Terror" to their raucous textures on
"Too Many Cooks," from the fuzz-inflected mayhem of "Skeleton
Key to the City" to the turbulent "At The Shopping Centre," the
expansive 5-minute ambient jam on "Insect Invasion" and the
surprisingly lyrical waltz-time closer "Goodbye," this renegade
outfit never fails to inject an element of surprise into each potent track. And
while certain pieces like "Ceasefire", "The Boot" or the
groove-heavy "Women's Power" may seem like well-crafted and tightly
executed compositions, Holub explains that most of the music heard on Umbrella
Weather comes about organically in the studio through a keen sense of
collective intuition honed over the past 13 years of playing together. "In
general, very little is written. We are mostly working in a typical jazz style
of head-solos-head but in almost every tune the solos are completely open. This
concept of free improvisation is a tricky one because it has become a genre all
its own, but we are looking at it in a different way. With some of the tunes,
we are sort of composing in the moment, rather than the sort of free
association that is often thought of as free-improvisation.
Led Bib
formed in 2003 as Holub's Master's degree project at Middlesex University.
"We went through quite a few different people at the very beginning, but
by the time of our first release in 2005 (Arboretum, SLAM Productions) the line
up was set and hasn't changed since," he explains. Holub runs down the
backgrounds of his Led Bib colleagues:
"Chris
Williams is perhaps the most involved in the 'jazz' scene of all of us, though
this is definitely more on the contemporary side. He is a founding member of
Let Spin, a key member of Laura Cole's Metamorphic.
Liran Donin
works a lot as a producer outside of Led Bib working both in Jazz, but also in
the realms of Pop and World Music, most notably recently with Namvula Rennie,
Mulatu Astatke, Arun Ghosh and Chrissie Hynde.
Toby McLaren
is working as a producer, mostly in the rock world. He also plays keyboards for
The Heavy, a sort of soul rock band that does quite well in the USA. He seems
to be over there all the time these days!
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