Alan Tomlinson trombones
Steve Beresford electronics
Steve Noble drums and percussion

New Year 2024: as London watches the remains of the sunken Boat Ting club float away down the river Thames, it's time to ask: did we just live through a golden age of comedy improvised music? And did some British musicians take it further than anyone else? Let me quote David Toop: “I would argue that the incidental music, montage and sound effects created for radio comedy shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour, The Jack Jackson Show and The Goon Show were as influential on the musical experimentation of my generation in Britain as Stockhausen or Cage.”
Of course the performers on this album are musicians first, and comedy is a bonus. Though I never saw Alan Tomlinson play without laughing out loud at some point. Alan takes his role as a clown seriously, to the extent of dressing up as a medal-strewn US general and delivering a speech - all via the trombone. He extends the horn slide to its ultimate length and spins around, bouncing stereo effects off the walls, or taps the bell for an exquisite ringing, amplified with perfect microphone technique. Born in Manchester, he acquired far more classical technique than most improvisers at the City of Leeds College of Music, and happily refers to that tradition in his improvising. And if the trombone has long been renowned for comedy, Alan is like a dog chewing up that renown and thrusting it back through the letterbox into the street.
Steve Beresford is a pianist, but small venues often have no piano, so what we are treated to here is his astonishing and quicksilver virtuosity on a table-full of keyboards and cheap electronic gizmos. Beresford's hovering space-organs have just beamed in from a low-budget shlock movie, and they sound surprised to have crash-landed on a furious jungle dancefloor. But the sci-fi soundbeams fuse perfectly with Steve Noble's metallic scrapes and calmly bowed cymbals. Noble is a remarkable free jazz drummer, but we watch him for his timing: those scampering chopsticks swerve into a temple's worth of gongs and bells, only to be plunged into a raging maelstrom of drum-kit racket.
It's all music, but humour runs through it like a babbling brook. You never know what will turn out to be funny - it might be just a trombone mute dropped on the floor. But no one drops a mute like Alan Tomlinson. [Clive Bell]