Perch, Hen Brock & Rain
The band:
About Perch, Hen Brock & Rain
Olie Brice, Javier Carmona and I used to get together to play weekly during my last year in London and have continued to play together even though Javier has moved to Spain and we now live in three different countries. Our debut album is being released on Vinyl (my first ever Vinyl) on Babel in May 2012.
Exploring an endless textural palette beyond the boundaries of tonality, conventional rhythmic organization and preconceived notions of what experimental jazz should sound like, Catatumbo is a trio right at the cutting edge of the contemporary avant-improv scene. Featuring the German-born, former London, now Brooklyn-based original F-IRE Collective tenor/soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock; the now Barcelona-based young drummer/percussionist Javier Carmona who is one of the movers and shakers in the free improv field, and another ex-London resident; and young double bassist Olie Brice who currently has deep roots in both the new and old avant scenes in London. Although each of them offers very diverse musical backgrounds, there’s an energy and intensity characteristic of these musicians that creates a lot of empathy in the music they create on their new self-titled debut, recorded for the Babel label.
Catatumbo - 8 febrer 2011 Barcelona.
Formed in 2009, having at first toured the London improv scene in venues such as Flim Flam, the Klinker and the Oxford, Catatumbo furthered a strong group understanding through tours of the UK in November 2010 and Spain in February 2011. The three personalities gel emphatically on ‘Catatumbo’, recorded live at the Vortex in November 2010 and extremely well recorded by LOOP Collective trumpeter and dedicated studio producer Alex Bonney. Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has made a name for herself in New York recently, playing and recording frequently on the avant-jazz scene with such significant cutting edge underground artists as Weasel Walter, Trevor Dunn, Mary Halvorson and drummer Tom Rainey. On ‘Catatumbo’ she imaginatively deploys an extremely wide arsenal of resources from the extended free improv sax vocabulary as well as one that skates the outer limits of free bop, shifting easily on the recording between Albert Ayler-type skronk through playful dance rhythms to longer, more pensive tonal colourings. On an impulsive, volatile set that blurs the lines between group composition and improv, Olie Brice’s beautifully rounded double bass sound, sometimes played arco, is always bold, alert, ready to either respond or initiate while Carmona - who duos with the unique young tenor saxophonist Mark Hanslip on another new avant-jazz Babel recording ‘Dosados’ - adds a forceful polyrhythmic edge, partially drawn from a background playing in underground rock.