Review 1. The Wire

SUM
Invenio Ergo

What's going on here? As AMM drummer Eddie Prévost deals up backbeats and grooves – albeit grooves conversant in Elvin Jones, Sunny Murray and Louis Moholo – and guitarist Ross Lambert oscillates around alarmingly basic melodic intervals, is that really the sound of Seymour Wright's alto saxophone playing the devotional chant from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme? It looks like it might be – further down the line Wright starts on “Giant Steps”, twisting Coltrane's harmonic axis out of alignment, and defying purist free Improv's most sacred commands: thou shalt not quote, nor take thy instrumental idiom in vain.

Recorded before a paying audience at Cafe Oto in February 2009, Sum emerged from the Friday night improvisation workshops that, for the past ten years, Prévost has led in South London. As Brian Morton's booklet notes suggest, Wright and Lambert have now graduated with first class honours, although that workshop spirit – like Mingus advocated when he labelled groups as workshops to reflect his openended negotiation between composition and improvisation – remains, asserting a powerful presence in music that only adds itself up during performance.

So those Coltrane references aren't a problem – far from it, in fact, as Wright drips them into the discussion like relics plucked from jazz history. Lambert, too, evokes a history of jazz guitar. Rockist undertones suggest James 'Blood' Ulmer's harmelodic funk, while fragmenting stride guitar patterns hover perilously close to 1920s models like Eddie Lang or Lonnie Johnson. But unlike postmodern hokum, this trio don't expect feeding off borrowed evergreens will hand them a sense of purpose – rather, these historical references float into view and are grabbed, then dropped like a canary down a mineshaft to see if they can breathe in the structural labyrinth surrounding them. During the first set, Wright heralds a change of gear with an out-of-body high note that bleats incessantly, shifting the improvisational ground fundamentally. The energy harvested by those earlier stylistic discontinuities endures, but is now focused internally: nuances of texture and transforming hybrids of instrumental timbre leave specifics of idiom and style behind as a distant memory.

Philip Clark — Wire January 2010