Respond / React
Ill Considered and Theon Cross, ICA, London: Tuesday November 18, 2025
Theon Cross’s solo debut LP, Fyah, was pretty much my gateway drug to the current British improvised music world, and any time there’s been a chance to see him play live I’ve jumped at it. Shamefully, Ill Considered hadn’t been on my radar until their speaker-destroying (literally) set at this year’s Brick Lane Jazz Festival but that immediately elevated them onto the must-see-whenever-possible list. Clearly, Cross joining IC for two sets of entirely improvised music - with the band’s sleeve artist of career-long choice, Vincent De Boer, on hand to create new art alongside the music - was the proverbial no-brainer, even during the 2025 London Jazz Festival where every night brings agonising, indeed almost impossible, choices over which one event you have to pick from the dozen or more taking place at the same time.
Billed by New Soil founder Fred Bolza as ‘Side A’ and ‘Side B’, the two halves of this performance share similar dimensions but proceed in entirely different fashions. Although they’ve worked together before - Cross was one of the select group of guests who contributed to Ill Considered’s first album for New Soil, 2021’s Liminal Space - the first set feels, in places, a little like both parties are doing some sounding out of the other. You’d never describe any of these musicians as even remotely tentative, but Ill Considered have an established group dynamic and there are a few moments during the opening 45 minutes where it isn’t always immediately apparent where Cross will best fit in. But after the interval the tables are turned, with the tuba often taking the lead in describing and delineating the next shape that the ever-shifting, always-fluid exchange of musical ideas adopts.
Perhaps one day the evidence will be available for detailed and repeated inspection - Bolza hints in his introduction that the label might release it, which implies it is being recorded; and before an entirely deserved encore, saxophone colossus Idris Rahman notes that the two sets were both 45 minutes long because that’s as much as you can get on two sides of vinyl. So here’s hoping. But in the meantime, responses will have to be restricted to remembered snapshots and fleeting impressions.
Among the things that strike and stick:
We tend to think of jazz as being a musical form in which those not soloing are accompanying, yet for vast parts of the evening the four players share the responsibility for leading and directing the music simultaneously. I don’t know if that sentence makes sense, nor whether it gets close to conveying what I mean, but it’s the best I can do for now. Further: even group improvisation landmarks like Ornette Coleman’s double quartet LP often seem to offer music that, to these ears, feels linear, compositionally - each part having a beginning, a middle and an end, regardless of how each instrument interacts with the others. Tonight, the emerging composition feels three-dimensional, each player supplying not a horizontal line but a brick of sound that sits within the wider edifice and builds on and around the others’ parts.
De Boer’s art emphasises this impression, wide brushes applying uneven layers of black (the visual effect is of graphite dust being moved around a dirty grey ceramic tile) in thick seams before the wrist twists and the breadth of the brush stroke slims to a single strand. Occasionally he stacks different layers one on top of the other, like sedimentary rock exposed when a cliff face erodes (throughout the evening, he rolls his paper over the light table: when that double-album gets released, there’s got to be a limited-edition version where the sleeve comes as a scroll). At other times he’s executing a kind of calligraphy, echoing the music’s abstractions with things that look like they ought to be words but which aren’t and therefore resist easy and obvious interpretation. During ‘Side B’ there is a period where he works with both hands at once, a pen-like brush in each, starting in the centre of the screen with the gestures and tracks left by one hand mirroring the other, all the way to the edge of the frame.
It’s a global party. At one stage Cross takes us under the waves, the tuba recalling whale song. Another time, he and Rahman square up, firing musical salvoes across, around and through each other, and you’re in New Orleans on Mardi Gras, watching the Big Chiefs respectfully vying for creative supremacy, before agreeing each is as pretty as the other. There’s a brief moment when Ramazanoglu - who, throughout the evening, throws in what sounds like a little stutter or stumble (but absolutely isn’t), keeping the audience on our toes and likely doing much the same to his bandmates - smashes into a riff that’s a dead ringer for something Al Foster played behind Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall in 1974, then after a bar it’s gone, changed, metamorphosed into a different time and place. When Donin goes high on the neck of his bass guitar he (for this listener, anyway) manages to evoke Lagos circa 1970 and Manchester circa 1980 at the same time. Towards the end of ‘Side B’ there’s a collective exploration of rhythm and melody that feels Caribbean.
Often, we see artists improvising in a group situation watching one another for visual cues. This happens tonight, but not very often. There’s a minute in the second half during which Rahman and bassist Liran Donin hold a brief conversation, but that’s while Cross and drummer Emre Ramazanoglu are sparring: rather than talking about the next musical idea, they’re pointing and looking at the screen behind them, presumably discussing what a great job De Boer is doing of approximating and responding to the sounds and atmospheres they’re conjuring. A couple of times Rahman walks around Ramazanoglu’s kit and there may be some visual or even audible communication there. But for the most part, these four musicians are just listening to one another. That listening is deep, total and concentrated: the solidity and certainty of the music demands it, and grows out of it. And clearly, these are all vastly skilled musicians who’ve been working in improvised settings long enough for such focused interaction to be, by now, second nature. Yet still there are numerous moments where a bass line will pick up an idea implied by something happening on the cymbals; where the sax becomes the principal driver of the rhythm, and changes it mid flow; where the tuba switches from providing the supporting sonic superstructure to carrying the melodic top line; and you’re left thinking: “how did he even hear that?”
No one idea is allowed to overstay its welcome, despite this being music that seems to derive from and come alive within what, for want of a better term, I’m going to refer to as a groove, and which you’d therefore maybe expect, a couple of times at least, to find yourself wearying of. There is a solidity and a strength to everything played - even the brief moments of quietude, in which the squalls and shouts turn to drizzles and breaths, feel really heavy - but nothing ever becomes overpowering. This is even more remarkable considering the absolute commitment and intensity that fuel every note played. In lesser hands there are sections that would be allowed to carry on building, to spiral up and out, getting bigger and denser until their flying apart or their implosion became not just inevitable but necessary. Instead, each thought or motif gets pushed into a new direction, or is carefully and expertly manipulated into an unexpected, daring and exciting new shape.