It's Gettin' Better (Man!!)
Knats, Kaidi Akinnibi, The Colossals, 100 Club, London: Wednesday January 21, 2025
A shorter version of this review - the 7” edit, if you like -
is beinghas been published by UK Jazz News. It was originally supposed to be just for them, but I got a bit carried away and it ended up about three times longer than seems sensible for a proper website to wish to inflict on its readers. I reckon you lot won’t mind, though, so here’s the whole thing - the full-length original LP 12” remixed and extended version. Do please go and read UKJN’s too, which has different - if no more technically competent - photos.
It may be one of the lower-key examples of the type, and it certainly does some things very differently to many, but the 100 Club’s brief January Jazz Festival gets all the important bits right on the first of its three nights. A venue which, depending on your age and musical preferences, is either synonymous with the golden age of British jazz, the birth of punk, or Northern Soul all-nighters, gives its stage over to three superb young UK bands who manage to channel elements of all that history while sharing music that could not have existed at any time but now.
Playing their first show for two years, and their first ever with an expanded line-up including keyboards and vocals, The Colossals prove an inspired choice for opener. Perhaps partly because leader and bassist Cara Joshi spent three years in indie-rock press darlings NewDad, the room is well on the way towards being full by the time their set begins, the vast majority - mirroring the band members - in their teens or early 20s, and looking little like the stereotypical London jazz festival crowd, though all are ready and keen to applaud the solos.
On their barely used Instagram page the group describe themselves as “Dream-funk”, and a tight set of sparky, spiky instrumentals - vocalist Daisy’s contributions extensive but largely wordless - deliver on that enigmatic promise. The highlight for this first-time listener comes when Joshi introduces a piece simply as “a cover”, then launches into a pacy duel with the drummer, her slapping and snapping on the bass inevitably recalling Larry Graham. First thoughts are, OK, whatever this is, it’s not something I know; only for the sax, two guitars and keyboards to eventually reveal it to be a ripsnorting, firebreathing, wholly original and deliriously intoxicating take on the Meters’ deathless ‘Cissy Strut’, the original’s stuttering slouch transformed, barrelling the piece almost into disco territory. It really shouldn’t work, but does, tremendously.
The overall effect of the set is to somehow sum up 1970s America, but with a totality few other artists can have attempted, and simultaneously to resituate the band’s sound in the here and the now. Echoes of Talking Heads’ or ESG’s art funk combine with the sophistication of early Chic, the explosive exuberance of the Ramones and the guttersnipe cool of the New York Dolls, all while nodding at the sharper parts of the CTI catalogue and with the whole caboodle wrapped in the kind of brittle unorthodoxy that fuelled Miles circa On the Corner. The digital disruptors will surely have to answer for their crimes against music’s economic ecology one day, but it’s hard to conceive of a band like The Colossal existing without their generation’s unfettered access to the whole of musical history: these gifted and intensely imaginative musicians have been able to draw from wherever their curiosity and good taste has led them, without being restricted to learning from only what’s current or presently in print. Let’s hope it’s not another two years until their next gig.
If it’s unexpected to hear the band with the indie-rock pedigree mining an individual and mutant strain of jazz-funk, what follows the between-sets soundtrack (there’s a first time for everything, and tonight it’s Black Sabbath being played at a jazz festival) is, in its own way, no less startling. Kaidi Akinnibi is a familiar face - and force - within London’s current school of forward-looking improvisers, playing tenor sax frequently on record and on stage with the likes of Blue Lab Beats (as reviewed here last summer) and Doomcannon. But last summer he released a superb solo debut LP, Like In Dreams, that showcased his talents as singer, songwriter and guitarist, too.
His set here is drawn from that excellent record, extending the arrangements and intensifying what was already a unique sound and style. While “soul-jazz” might feel like an appropriate designation, this music is more about learning from established genres and traditions rather than existing within any of them. Certain kinds of purist might not like it, but certain kinds of purist didn’t think much of Ornette at the Five Spot, and we know how that all turned out.
Songs like ‘Real Enough’ coalesce around Akinnibi’s honeyed baritone (while the new British school’s debt to D’Angelo is extensive and widely shared, Akinnibi’s singing voice recalls another neo soul icon, John Legend), the lyrics wrestling with untameable and almost unmanageable ideas (”If these days don’t thrill me, then my soul is on the line/It’s all in vain/It’s not real enough”). Around this, he and his superb band - bass, keyboards and drums - build exquisite pressure that is released through dextrously stacked sax riffs and periods of ferociously focused improvisation, mostly as a group but with a judicious selection of richly rewarding solos. The majority of the songs require Akinnibi to utilise all three of his instruments, and the arrangements allow time for the guitar to be swapped for the sax - the spaces created giving the thoughts they are drawn from the chance to breathe and settle. The album’s sole instrumental, ‘Escape Room’, is where each band member seems to be let off the leash, its essay in attack and release writ even larger on stage, but the whole set is very special. These are big, beautiful songs, intimate yet stadium-ready, played with precision and passion by people whose poise and sense of control suggest that they are only going to keep on getting better.
Emphasising this notion of continual and ongoing progress, headliners Knats - singled out by the reliably erudite Evie Hill in her UK Jazz News recommendations for artists not to miss at April’s Brick Lane Jazz Festival - appear to have reached the stage where they are almost outpacing themselves. The Newcastle band’s debut album is not yet 10 months old, but they have already moved so far on that their set here includes nothing from it. Instead, they play almost all of their forthcoming second LP, and even include a new song written since it was finished. Yet at no point does this performance feel at all provisional: such is the band’s assurance, and such is the excitable, inclusive warmth of the sound they have come up with, that a first listen to each of these new songs is like being introduced to someone you just know is going to become your new best friend.
As if taking cues from the night’s other two performances, Knats have expanded their line-up, and much of the set features songs with vocals. These come, mostly, from poet and some-time stand-up comedian Cooper Robson, who has worked with the band on the new album, A Great Day In Newcastle, wherein they double down on their promise/threat to create a new sub-genre: Geordie jazz. Robson’s poetry is a perfect fit for Knats’ developing style, and that newest track - ‘Bowling Ball’, which bassist and de facto master of ceremonies Stan Woodward explains is the group’s response to last year’s outbreak of far-right flag-waving - shows exactly how and why. His delivery thickly and proudly accented, his words precisely chosen and each line carefully formed, Robson skewers his targets with understatement and infectious good humour, rising above the considerable temptation to attack with anger or devolve into rage.
Around his words, Woodward and colleagues build a sonic vehicle as versatile as a Transit van and as indomitable as a Chieftain tank. A typical Knats song has enough different elements, takes enough twists and turns, to suggest it might have been assembled from fragments of different ideas pulled from different writing and rehearsal sessions and stitched together into a finished collage, yet the transitions and switches from one piece to another have been so finessed that the results always sound natural and evolved rather than painstakingly constructed. This means that each piece is constantly offering the potential to surprise the listener, while allowing each player to contribute something special and individual - and at the same time, the constant presence of accessible and relatable motifs, melody lines and rhythmic devices means that every song offers an audience any number of different ways in.
The group has grown around the bass and drums partnership Woodward formed with childhood best buddy King David Ike Elechi, and - as a result - friendship and community is obviously and audibly at the heart of everything Knats do. They have acquired additional members over time, trumpeter Ferg Kilsby and keyboard player Sandro Shargarodsky both involved since the making of the first album. Shargarodsky is prodded into apparently reluctant service as vocalist during the mid-set performance of 2025 single ‘Take a Seat On the Settee’, but Woodward seeks to offset his nerves by teaching the audience the chorus before they begin playing, conscripting us all into Knats’ tune army. Geordie Greep, founder of the noise-rock band Black Midi, who produced A Great Day In Newcastle, joins on guitar for ‘Carpet Doctor’, a song that starts out like an electric Muddy Waters tune before the band set about dismantling it and playing around with its different constituent parts. They end with the rousing, rollicking ‘Never Gonna Be a Boxer’, a song that encapsulates all the different parts of what they do and which make Knats so special. The as-yet unreleased track is greeted as if it was a career-defining anthem, but by this point, Knats’ uncanny ability to make us all feel like we’ve grown up with these songs and the characters and situations they describe is no longer a surprise.
Knats = Tune Army !! Nice one.
Nice words Angus! Good to meet you Saturday evening. Ben (and Natasha)