Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid - The Exchange Sessions Vol. 2

Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid

The Exchange Sessions Vol. 2

As much as I like to think I'm the bottomless well of music knowledge (not to mention the taste-making tour-de-force that is sorely lacking in global media) I didn't know who Steve Reid was. Were it not for a selection of magazine insets advertising the first Exchange Session disc, and the handy press-release (you can tell you've been doing this a while when reading the release counts as research), I'd be unaware that he drummed for Miles Davis, Fela Kuti and James Brown (among others). My only defence is that he doesn't do any drumming on any of the albums I own. His name still sounds to me like a man who played Left Back in Leyton Orient's 1986 squad. If you're a jazz musician, you really should have a cool name like Milford, Ornette or Thelonious. Steve just doesn't cut it. If I didn't already know that Kieran Hebdan is post-rock folktronic hero Fourtet, I'd assume he was playing a similar position in the 2006 squad.

The Exchange Sessions are intended to break down the barriers between live organic jazz, and supposedly soulless and clinical electronica. Recorded live over a day in the studio, Steve Reid played some drums, and Kieran Hebdan pressed some buttons. All live, no overdubs, and all improve. Just like great jazz should be. And in my book of opinions, you'll find that jazz generally is rated GOOD and electronica usually as either QUITE NICE or SOMETIMES INTERESTING. As promising as this might sound, it really doesn't work in practice.

Listening to Fourtet's solo recordings, I'm always struck by how lovely they are, but ultimately how shapeless (and therefore dull) they are. The same criticism can be levelled here. No matter how pumped up or impassioned you might be, you're still pushing buttons to trigger samples. The whole point of synthesisers in the first place was that every time you press a key it will sound the same; regardless of how hard you push it or how much pain you're imagining. A machine's doing all the work for you. Unfortunately, the drums fall at a similar, if differently inclined, fence. I've got enough solo albums by jazz drummers to know that no matter how good you might be at hitting things, unless you've got a tune framing your conga solo or snare break, it just sounds like you're hitting things at random (one exception to this is Milford Grave's Grand Unification where he constantly tells you what's coming next. It isn't really interesting, but it is funny to hear a crazy old man shouting "You want some cowbell?" before launching a blistering attack on the aforementioned bell.)

No one raves about ‘Moby Dick' just on account of the drums: They rave because of the way the riff kicks back in and makes it feel like a real song with a fucking massive drum solo. And when an album clocks in with three 15+ minute tracks of fluid electronic swells, cymbal washes, beeps and chimes without once seeming like any of it is going anywhere, you realise that you've left free-form jazz altogether and mutated into just being free-formless. An album with admirable intentions, but pretty disappointing in practice.

Keith Patterson

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