Sunday night @ the Globe: The Great Deceivers – March 23

© Ken Drew

Tom Atkinson (guitar, vocals); Josh Bentham (alto sax, tenor sax); Stu Dawson (bass, vocals); Jeff Armstrong (drums)

Time for a re-appraisal and resurgence of music from 50 years ago?  Tom Atkinson certainly thinks so, as did an enthusiastic crowd at the Globe in the “Sunday night jazz slot”.  Atkinson’s latest one-off project is a carefully and convincingly crafted tribute to King Crimson and their music of 1969-1974, with the stage name of Great Deceivers taken from the first track of Crimson's 1974 album, Starless and Bible Black. Atkinson has form in renaissance of this era with previous jazz-rock projects aired in his NE home including the music of Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, Miles Davis’ Jack Johnson, Billy Cobham and Pharoah Sanders.

As the founders of whatever prog rock is, Crimson stretch the “jazz” moniker, but for my money the early version improvised freely, were plenty experimental in instrumentation and technology and their first, ground-breaking album In the Court of the Crimson King even mixed “jazz sounding” reeds and percussion in with the trademark portentous anthems. Later prog of course became bloated and pompous and was eventually eaten by punk, so I was interested to see if the first five years of prog covered here could be made to sound authentic rather than a tasteless retro pastiche.

For me the answer was a resounding yes, and it would have been interesting to have some young ears in the crowd not so familiar with the Crimson canon to see what they made of it. Younger jazz players are now re-discovering prog and fusion and taking inspiration from the more tasteful (and of course technically challenging) strands but there are still few opportunities to hear it live.

© Ken Drew

The band had obviously worked hard at getting this complex and detailed music under their fingers (and sticks) and the no-nonsense up-and-at-it hour and a half set was impressively tight and slickly programmed, including seminal tracks such as Easy Money, Cat Food, Great Deceiver, One More Red Nightmare and a sublime Starless. Atkinson’s highly impressive guitar playing was front and centre of course, with the authentic feel of Robert Fripp’s range of sounds, effects, feedback and rhythmical devices – although he didn’t sit down as Fripp does! Amazingly, after the first instrumental number he confidently added the Greg Lake/John Wetton lead vocal duties on top of the formidable guitar parts.

The delivery of the later trio numbers was very effective and powerful, with fluid bass lines from Stu Dawson and the challenging drum part carried off confidently and accurately by Jeff Armstrong. The breadth and variety of Crimson’s earlier music is a challenge as you can’t really expect flute, clarinet, viola, reed organ and a mellotron with a band like this, but Josh Bentham made a great job of stretching the sound of his sax from righteous to raucous as required.

Altogether a most enjoyable romp through much loved (in some quarters!) music by a talented and professional band and the epic encore rendition of 21st Century Schizoid Man (complete with ten minute drum solo!) seemed entirely appropriate to these troubled times. Atkinson has plans to take this set on a wider tour as well as taking on some Mahavishnu: on tonight’s evidence I’d be up for both. Chris K