Music

William Parker, Hamid Drake & John Dikeman

Poetry Club, Glasgow

FOUR STARS

Rob Adams

It was a night of three-act plays, in a sense, at the Poetry Club. In the first of a series of concerts featuring top improvising musicians – the Magic Science Orchestra with the veteran saxophonist from Sun Ra’s Arkestra Marshall Allan are due in town on October 2 – saxophone and drums duo Death Shanties opened with three uncompromising but dynamically varied blasts before handing over to the American headliners.

Although they’re not exactly strangers to Scotland, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake’s visits are relatively rare and their trio with saxophonist John Dikeman produced a showcase of spontaneous music-making’s strengths.

Acknowledging the venue they were booked into, Parker had prepared a poem depicting a dream in which a mad strangler was targeting music critics. He won’t be alone in having such reveries but this opening act was both darkly entertaining, with all sorts of musical and historical characters playing unlikely cameos, and a model of how the spoken word can trigger apt, probing and nudging musical commentaries from Drake and Dikeman.

The central improvisation found Parker and Drake maintaining a fascinating conversation that took them through myriad rhythms and tempi, flavoured by Parker’s dark bowing, flamenco-like right-hand fluttering, humorous use of effects switches and lighter chanting of “don’t fight the funk”, while Dikeman veered from physically declamatory playing to tender responses to Drake’s fabulously musical ebb and flow.

There was more tenderness in the final piece as Drake, on a hand drum, and Parker, on hocchiku (wooden flute), communed with their ancestral spirits, creating a beautiful folk song with the lightest of touches which Dikeman matched with gently enquiring lines.