POLAR BEAR | LIVE REVIEW
Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama, Cardiff, Fri 26 Sept
It’s tempting to ask what jazz is for in 2014. After all, we’re a long from the annus mirabilis of 1959, when giants such as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus were pushing an already established artform into new configurations, and new terms to describe the music were being coined on an almost album-by-album basis. The European jazz tradition has long since diverged from American norms, and Polar Bear are closer to the cerebral abstraction favoured by European artists on the ECM label than they are to traditional notions of jazz.
So is this jazz? There’s certainly the obvious signifiers of ‘jazzness’ (for want of a better term) such as saxophones, an upright bass, long improvisational stretches; but there’s also plenty here that’s influenced by other traditions: heavy metal, Somali music, drum‘n’bass. It’s difficult to say exactly what it is that Polar Bear are doing, but it’s not difficult to appreciate it.
Now on their second Mercury Prize nomination (“what are the odds it will win?” an audience member asks at one point, to which saxophonist Pete Wareham deadpans “dead cert”), Polar Bear, with their defiantly noisy sound, are well on their way to becoming something of an institution. Over the last couple of years the band have moved away from the traditional song structures that underpinned their earlier work, into a area of greater abstraction where composed melodic segments are interleaved with segments of free improvisation. Most of the pieces tonight are not played as separate songs, but as named improvisational themes that segue into each other.
The crux of the group is the interplay between the different musicians. There’s the contrasting tenor saxophone styles of Mark Lockheart, whose playing is more structured and thoughtful, and Pete Wareham (also part of the excellent Melt Yourself Down, and Acoustic Ladyland, two groups who also tug at the loose threads of jazz to see what happens) who seems to represent a more anarchic strain of improvised music, all the while altering the sound of his saxophone with electronic devices. Seb Rochford has to be one of the most interesting drummers in the country at the moment, and switches easily from traditional African rhythms to frenzied freak-outs without ever losing the serene expression on his face.
Most of the pieces performed tonight come from their newest record In Each And Every One. The pre-composed parts where the two saxophones play in unison throw up some beautiful passages which seem to be based on half-remembered folk melodies, and the improvised passages, where the members of the group each head off on divergent yet complimentary paths, fizz with spontaneous ideas. Difficulties with categorical definitions aside, Polar Bear are a fantastic live band.
words DAVID GRIFFITHS
