Jazz breaking: Birth of a band as Blue Touch Paper debut
Monday, March 12, 2012
Blue Touch Paper debuted at the weekend, a new band put together by composer and keyboardist Colin Towns.
This concert in Hall Two of Kings Place in London marked the launch of their debut album Stand Well Back, ahead of their nationwide tour in May.
Jazz-rock comes in many varieties. At its worst it's unlistenable, more at home in the studio and where audio design, a mannered machismo and fearsome technique is an absolute necessity. It can also sound dated. At its best, as with a band of Blue Touch Paper’s quality, it allows a bird's eye view of a music that is very much of the present, with a feel for the bigger picture and a way of bringing challenging ideas to the table. Colin Towns assembled Blue Touch Paper, an Anglo-German sextet, partly to meet a challenge he set himself, to hone his widescreen ideas into the domain of a smaller group. Featuring keyboards, lots of sampled sounds triggered by Towns, drums and percussion, sax, electric bass and guitar, the band traverses jazz-rock roughly from when Weather Report dropped off the scene, occasionally saying a respectful hello to the later Zawinul Syndicate in passing, but mostly steering a path only Towns could navigate. Magnificent electric bass from impressive newcomer Edward Maclean and subtle space for Troyka guitarist Chris Montague with Benny Greb in the big-chops Dennis Chambers role aided and abetted superbly by some very carefully weighted congas and shakers contributions from Stephan Maass, while Polar Bear’s Mark Lockheart was muse to Towns' eloquent and often mysteriously complex keyboard lines that conjured atmospheres both dark and light.
The occult Act 1, Scene 1 Witches scene from Macbeth was melded via spoken word samples to the live improvising, and Maclean’s ballad feature in the first half was a definite highlight, in the moodscape of ‘A Remark You Made’. The band's album Stand Well Back is a departure for Towns and a considerable achievement given that he had to create a new vehicle for his music in dreaming up this band from scratch, while also providing it with charts that hold the interest and move the music and even the genre forward.
– Stephen Graham
Blue Touch Paper play Turner Sims in Southampton on 16 May, the Clywd Theatr, Mold on 17 May; Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 18 May; Wardrobe, Leeds, 21 May; 606, London, 22 May; and Djanogly Theatre, Nottingham, 23 May