The thrill isn't gone: This is very listenable to striking in its simplicity but which retains your interest as you dive further in. A tenor saxophone line from James Allsopp subliminally sends you in your private thoughts to Ornette Coleman. And yet here this style has neither the usual register, timbre nor the raw bluesy ache when you get over that invasive thought and stop dancing with the past to listen on its own terms which frankly is far more important. The drummer who knows about beginnings, middles and ends happens to be the name on the tin - Dave Storey - recall go on the storied Jouska that impressed immeasurably back in 2020.
Most of the tunes are Allsopp's, known for his work with Golden Age of Steam and the maverick Snack Family that also featured cult vocalist Andrew Plummer. Storey (photo: above press) who still isn't that known but really should be told Charlie Anderson of the estimable Sussex Jazz Magazine in a 2019 interview that at a jazz course in Chichester he ''met a lot of other musicians my age who were interested in jazz. Then we all went up to Middlesex University and did that. If I hadn’t gone to that college I don’t think I would have ended up in London, so that was a very important step for me. Then I had a year out and went to the Royal Academy of Music where I met James Allsopp and started playing around town a bit more.''
Conor Chaplin on bass - last heard live in January by one of the marlbank elves on fine form at the Pheasantry with erudite singer Tessa Souter, the great Billy Drummond and Katie Melua pianist Jim Watson - is quite demure here, but the key thing is with such a fine foray into the near-freeness 'Gemelli' there are three ''voices'' one song, the tumble of tom, slight tonal shifting amid a velvety softness of saxophone, fabulous jingling of sax keys from Allsopp when you get to the meat of the improvisation and gutsy emoting all part of the recipe as Allsopp - Geronimo - reaches almost to the altissimo heights. It's clear the drummer is playing to and really getting the tune and the labyrinthine melody line but this is less test tube lab baby experimentation and far more eventual toddler walking with delight for the first time. Circeo has Allsopp originals plus a version of all-time classic 'Body and Soul' that Coleman Hawkins made jazz history with in 1939 nine years after Ambrose first recorded the belovèd Johnny Green song. Available via Clonmell Jazz Social
Told and untold Storeys unfold live at the Vortex in Dalston on 3 May
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