MUSIC

(Grain Barge, Bristol, Wed 28 Sept) It turned out to be a prophetic choice of name. Never the most overexposed of bands, Limbo’s performing diary went blank some three years ago when trumpeter Roger Mills defected to Australia (admittedly his homeland) and left the band to their own devices.  These included the Scissor Sisters for keyboard player John Garden, and the Dave Perry Trio for the eponymous sax player and Paul Wigens, the drummer. The DPT opening set was, as always, a fresh and engaging set of modern jazz, with Dave’s melodic tunes providing great solo opportunities and the unflagging rhythms provided by Wigens and tireless bass player Jo Allen giving momentum and dynamic. It’s a great way to start proceedings, but there’s no doubting the focus of the evening when Limbo, replete with their errant trumpeter on a brief UK visit, assemble. Something begins, then, with the exploratory randomness of a soundcheck that settles into a building rhythm pattern as Joe Evans’s bass finds a hook into Wigens’s drumming and Perry’s scratching bass clarinet mellows alongside Mills’s crooning trumpet. Once locked together, the sound blossoms into a kraut-nodding evolution, Garden’s electronica and John Wygens’s coasting guitar filling the texture as it shifts from Can to Fall and on into a spacious Massive backbeat. Mills’s trumpet is fluent and restrained at this point, and the whole sound becomes elegant and spare, a reggae roll that slowly tightens into a clenched funk and Garden’s stabbing clavinet the definitive voice. It’s exactly this sort of sonic architecture that has always made Limbo’s essentially improvised music so rivetingly accessible: they know exactly the effect they want and the precise tones and notes to achieve it. Wigens’s drumming is a key driver, but it’s the leftfield response of the others that enriches the ideas: thus a hard 4-beat pop groove gets whalesong sax and Philip Glass-style keyboard arpeggios before a Muscle Shoals brass onslaught heralds a rare moment of pure psychedelic freak-out. That turbulence falls apart, by design, to leave Perry’s eloquent tenor sax playing a sweet melody like an abandoned radio in the smoking aftermath of disaster. Nobody does this sort of thing better, and it’s sad more people haven’t been here to witness the momentary re-emergence of one of Bristol’s finest live acts. (Tony Benjamin)

Copyright Tony Benjamin 2011