Despite its fine cover, this one passed me by when it was released last year, and, I think, I found it on a John Pope discography somewhere. One look at the line-up would immediately suggest it was a must have, especially for someone who has followed the North East scene in recent years. As well as Pope (possibly the hardest working man in show business at the moment) most of the others, bar Jafrate are regular visitors to local bandstands or recording sessions. A bit of research reveals that Uroboro have been in existence, originally as a trio (Jafrate, Cole, Pope) since 2018 and have evolved into the quintets that recorded this album.
Jafrate is the leader for this project, responsible for all the
compositions and the spoken word poems. It’s a double CD of studio tracks on
the first disc, four of which get a live run out on disc 2. Pope was
unavailable for the live date so Andy Champion stepped in.
What of the music, though? Much of it is rich, dense, broad screen, full
spectrum, sounding like a much bigger band than just a quintet. Opener in passing is both a call to arms and a
statement of intent. A solo horn calls out and is followed by knotty, complex
intermingling of sounds, Pope’s bass rumbling at first then developing real forward
drive, half promising that A Love Supreme
is going to step forward from the cloud.
That seems to be the shape of much of the music. Pope and Johnny Hunter
anchor the pieces with solid rolling patterns and the others have freedom to
extemporise over them. This is, however, a long way from a basic head and solos
routine. The music is full of thrilling, escapist moments that don’t follow on
from a solo but build on it creating a real wall of sound that is quite
overwhelmingly exciting. It’s a celebration as well of nature, the Dales and
the Pennines, of big skies and of the nature that lives around Jafrate’s part
of Yorkshire. You could imagine this music as a soundtrack to Benjamin Myers’
novel Gallows Pole, which is set in
the area, if Swedish band Goat hadn’t got there first.
Jafrate is credited as the composer but acknowledges that he brought
only the bare bones to the sessions and the others worked them up into the
pieces as they were recorded and it sounds like it. It sounds like a communal
effort with no one standing back and waiting their turn. This frequently means
that the music is layered upon layer and can be overwhelming but you don’t wait
long for someone to rise above the surface; Anton Hunter’s guitar is especially
good at this.
As well as moments of density there are also periods where the front
line floats above Johnny Hunter and Pope, such as during wild bird which features sax, piano and guitar winding around each
other, each briefly more prominent but operating as a flowing, combined trio.
Despite the fact that Jafrate is a saxophonist, it sounds like an album
led from the back, with everything built off Johnny Hunter and Pope or
Champion. A dream where birds dream
is worth a special mention. It’s a bit of jazz poetry that gives the nod to
Jafrate’s day job. He delivers his poem over backing from just bass and drums,
Hunter rolls and skips and, on the live version Champion punches out the timing
which Jafrate follows. It’s tight and swinging until the closing run when the
others join in and Hunter’s guitar rings out loud and bright.
If Mingus were still with us he’d be impressed with this album. Halfway
through listening to it the first time I realised I was going to run out of
superlatives and had to send out for some more.
A Story Like Fire came out at the fag end of last year after
everybody’s Album of the Year Lists had been compiled (it definitely would have
made my top 10) and didn’t, by a long way, get the level of attention it
deserved. That was a great pity, not least for the wider audience who may not
be aware of it, even now. (It did get a play on Jazz On The Tyne). I’m going to
buy some extra copies to give as birthday presents to spread the word.
Great cover as well, by
Luca Jafrate) inside and out.
Uroboro
– A Story Like Fire is available HERE
through the Discus Music Bandcamp page and from some other retailers and it was
briefly available, before I bought the only copy, at Rays Jazz in Foyles in
that big fancy London’s Charing Cross Road. The download from the Bandcamp site
includes an extra 5 tracks or about 40 minutes of music that didn’t make it
onto the album.
There are 6 videos from the live performance (about an hour of music) HERE on YouTube. Dave Sayer
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