Spring Heel Jack - The Sweetness of the Water

Spring Heel Jack
The Sweetness of the Water
Thirsty Ear Recordings

I used to do a jazz show on the college radio station at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, with my buddy Dave, it was called Krush Jazz. I named the show after DJ Krush, who put out a fantastic album, among many he’s done, called Ki-Oku with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo. The album is a great mix of trip hop/electronica and jazz. It’s a free jazz album that incorporates the new urban sounds, and beats, that are popular today. The album challenges jazz fans and hip hop/dance fans to come together. And I liked that idea, the idea of crushing barriers between genres, so I named the radio show Krush Jazz.

Anyway, Spring Heel Jack has always pushed along the same barriers that DJ Krush and Toshinori Kondo did on Ki-Oku. Spring Heel Jack started in England in the early 90s with members John Coxon – a producer who worked quite a bit with Spiritualized in the past- and Ashley Wales. The group began as a drum and bass outfit, with a jazzy feel to them. They got noticed by the band Everything But The Girl, did some work with them, got more popular, then hooked up with Thirsty Ear Records. Thirsty Ear is a totally sweet label out of New York who has worked with DJ Spooky, Henry Rollins, Pere Ubu, Teenage Fanclub, Brian Eno and others, and they have a series of albums called the “Blue Series” that was started by avant-garde jazz pianist Matthew Shipp.
Spring Heel Jack has released its past 4 or 5 efforts on Thirsty Ear and the band has even done a live outing with Shipp. Slowly, the Jacks are growing into more of a free jazz band than ever before; such is the sound of The Sweetness of the Water. The band has produced a rolling landscape of horns, guitar noodlings and extraneous electronic sounds, among other things. Along for the ride with Coxon and Wales, are trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, sax man Evan Parker, drummer Mark Sanders, and bass player John Edwards.
Random electronic noises and feedback guide about half of the 8 tracks on this CD, but it’s not jarring or redundant, and Edwards displays some fine fingerwork – especially on the opening track. But, Leo Smith and his trumpet are featured most prominently in this recording – screeching in and out of songs and dropping off short bursts of fine horn work.
The songs on The Sweetness of the Water range between about 3 minutes, to 9 minutes, and they each have their peaks and valleys, with hyperactivity at one point, and a soft lulling at the next. The recording is kind of a mix of Ornette Coleman and Tortoise, it is pleasant, for the most part, and enjoyable to listen to for fans of free jazz and “experimental” bands along the lines of Joan of Arc, but it is not essential. It doesn’t do enough to grip the listener constantly. The bass playing on track 1 is a powerfully catchy force, and the piano notes on track 5 perk up listener’s ears before Leo Smith’s spastic horn – reminiscent of a hyped up Terrance Blanchard, or even Miles Davis in his electro funk years – dives in and levels out, but there are too many dead spots on the album. These parts halt any momentum that was being gathered. They’re not bad stretches, per se - they sound more slightly tweaked meditation music from your Tai Chi class - but they just give the album more of a soundtrack feel. Like, a love scene must be playing in the studio now, oops,http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif here comes a fight, maybe a chase scene here, and that’s definitely the ‘someone’s gonna die’ music.
On The Sweetness of the Water, Spring Heel Jack is missing some of the great continuity it had in early songs, on early albums, where they had a sneaky bass line following a symbol beat throughout, tying everything together. The band is really pushing themselves in more of an experimental, free form, direction than ever before, and while the experiments might not all be great successes, they are exciting, and they should help the band in the future, just, not so much on this album.

See and hear some Spring Heel Jack on youtube.com HERE.