Adult Jazz

Rockfeedback Concerts Presents

ADULT JAZZ

A single-note drone fills the air, joined by a lilting, pitch-shifted vocal. The mercurial melody falls between folk, plainsong, pop and jazz, the words trigger equally beguiling images and the voice has an uninhibited, freestyle timbre. There are only periodic splashes of additional mutant colour and it’s not until four full minutes that polyrhythmic drums kick in to propel a uncanny, kinetic arrangement that constantly ebbs and flows.

At seven minutes and twenty nine seconds, ‘Hum’ is as audacious as it is a brilliant introduction to a record. But then Adult Jazz are an audacious proposition. Through nine tracks and 51 minutes, their debut album Gist Is, released on the band’s own label Spare Thought, is a voyage that’s startling, mesmerising and magical from start to finish, taking a labyrinthian, fragmented pop-not-pop path, through breathtaking detours, incorporating songs within songs, but very light on its feet and as playful as it is cerebral.

“Slippery and minimal,” was The Fly’s verdict in its top five ‘Ones To Watch’ for 2014. Reviewing ‘Springful/‘Am Gone’, the band’s AA-sided debut single released in January 2014, Stereogum described it as, “quirky and disjointed, yet somehow gliding gracefully through the air.” DIY magazine said, “a mind-bending strain of art-pop that promises to slot them somewhere alongside Wild Beasts and These New Puritans in terms of fantastically British seriousness.”

Whichever adjectives – and there will be many – are used to label Adult Jazz, only one thing is for certain: this music only obeys its own internal logic.