Music / jazz rock
Review: Slate Trio, El Rincon – ‘Just the right side of losing the plot’
As with the Great Crested Newt, sightings of the Slate Trio are rare and fleeting. That’s a shame, because on the evidence of this gig at El Rincon the band’s genre-straddling music definitely deserves a wider audience.
Slate Trio
The trio – Matt Jones on drums, Alex Heane on double bass and Neil Smith on guitar – are seasoned players with feet firmly in both rock and jazz camps (and a whole lot more besides).
The band’s instrumental music originates from Neil’s ideas – albeit evolved through jamming and susceptible to improvisation on the day – reflecting his capacity for stream of consciousness soloing.
is needed now More than ever
Behind those wayward guitar lines, Matt and Alex created their own textures of rhythm and tone, switching neatly from loose atmospherics to periods of tight groove that began to decay as soon as they arrived.
It felt as though the music was intended to test the limits of constant change while holding to a tune’s essential identity, always staying just the right side of losing the plot.
Slate Trio
Other tunes offered a wayward Hawaiian allure or a modified Afrobeat simmer. Modish Meg dropped brash Beefhearty dischords over jumpy cross-rhythms, the incessant guitar roaring in overdrive.
For a while Neil was on his knees pedal-fiddling to create cosmic aftersounds out of which the drums and bass reboiled. It became quite an eruption in that tiny space, yet somehow recombined to a neat, tight climax.
The main set ended with a calmer piece, a skeletal exploration of a single chord with African-tinged guitar and subsiding bass creating a gently shifting texture. Of course it became unsettled but then it resettled and finished quietly.
Slate Trio with Kay Grant
For their encore they were joined by vocalist Kay Grant – Neil is also part of her band – for an impromptu ‘blues’ as Neil announced it. And again, of course, it wasn’t that straightforward, more an improvised meander through an idea of the blues, fluently interactive and nicely unresolved.
It left something hanging in the air – hopefully the promise of more Slate Trio action in the future.
All images: Tony Benjamin
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