Kip Hanrahan has been described as "the Jean Luc Godard of music". It is a fair description, for the wayward New York producer, former art student and Carla Bley percussionist has been boiling up volatile musical brews and pouring them into albums and venues for nearly 25 years.
Conjure was one of Hanrahan's legendary projects, a 1984 recording that brought together free-jazz musicians, blues players and the poetry of the black American writer Ishmael Reed. This show in the Barbican Jazz series revisited it, with the stocky, long-haired Hanrahan pacing behind the 10-piece band issuing instructions, and the majestic figures of Ishmael Reed and blues guitarist Taj Mahal out front.
But this was no musical tiptoeing around the sacred words of a literary star. Much of the two-hour set consisted of exhilarating, flat-out jamming by a kind of Afro-Latin free-jazz soul band, with virtuoso sax improviser David Murray and Meters' guitarist Leo Nocentelli often breathtaking.
Reed's readings were not always audible against the thunder behind, but his pacing, and a solemnly compelling personal swing to his timing, made them highly musical even when the lyrics were lost. After an opening in which the band had gradually assembled over a dialogue between two bass guitarists, Reed began with a war poem. The New York violinist Billy Bang compounded the chilling mantra with high-pitched, swirling phrases.
The ensemble sprawled on the uptempo funk piece that followed, but had so tightened by the second hour that its only hitches involved Mahal's leisurely searches for the next score-sheet. Murray's sustained falsetto sounds and ghostly warbles on tenor sax, beginning over African vocal harmonies, grew ever more imperious, and the Tim Berne-like avant-funk alto sound of Yosvanny Terry was not far behind. The formidable Mahal adapted some Reed pieces to barrelling R&B guitar-and-holler boogies, but the night's singing spanned everything from Fernando Saunders's Otis Redding soul sound to percussionist/dancer Pedro Martinez's airy but insistent flutters. A one-off event.
