Performers of completely free, spontaneous music have an ambiguous relationship with their audience. Throughout this concert, saxophonist Lol Coxhill remained seated and utterly impassive, too absorbed to notice his fellow band members, let alone his increasingly uneasy audience. The extended, amorphous pieces had no endings, but drifted hazily into one another, leaving the spectators unsure whether to applaud. When they finally decided to give it a go during one lull, Coxhill was icily gracious, glancing up with a nod of thanks before murmuring: "Actually, we hadn't finished." The modest crowd - which thinned out alarmingly during the interval - did not make that mistake again.
This performance was part of a regional arts lottery project devised to team East Midlands bands with some of the UK's most respected jazz musicians. In this case the big cheese was Coxhill, a free-jazz saxophonist who has played with just about every major figure in improvised music, as well as collaborating with notable non-virtuosos the Damned. In Nottingham, Coxhill was teamed with a youthful quintet called Borderline Guerrillas, who offered a seething backdrop of vibes, twisted electronics, accordion, electric bass and drums.
Disturbing, dream-like washes of sound merged into thundering, inexplicable crescendos that coiled back into themselves and died a wheezing death. Mostly there was very little sense of swing, and although drummer Walt Shaw set up one or two compulsively skittering rhythms, his bandmates seemed reluctant to ride a groove for longer than a few bars. The result was a cacophony, the musical equivalent of a constantly twitching curtain that is never actually pulled back.
Some humour crept in: a tape of someone singing Knick Knack Paddywhack was played beneath one particularly abstract passage, Shaw frequently took time out to beat a saucepan with a large hammer, and the second half began with the group playing a free-jazz version of Happy Birthday. But for the most part this was a fiercely uncompromising exercise in random sound.
