"Is it just me," mouths a young woman, as Polar Bear leader/drummer Seb Rochford whispers his way through another announcement, "Or can nobody hear a word he's saying?" Another fan chuckles indulgently: "Oh you can never hear what he says." But the unintelligibility is somehow redeemed by charisma, making his band one of the great enigmas of current jazz. Polar Bear's sound is raw - sometimes brittle and uncompromising - yet they seduce an audience that's way outside the usual Brit-jazz suspects. They don't use the comfort zone elements of "accessible" jazz: no keyboards, funky bass guitar or percussion. Rochford's tunes are catchy, but think Ornette rather than Kylie. The tenor saxes of Mark Lockheart and Pete Wareham produce a deliberately unpolished timbre, even when they play nicely arranged passages over Tom Herbert's glowing double bass. Whether playing grooves or ballads, this is a band at the polar opposite of "smooth".
The fifth, wild-card element is Leafcutter John, the pale-cheeked youth apparently checking his emails at a nearby laptop. LJ nonchalantly produces a torrent of full-throated electronic noise that's more or less in synch with what the band's playing. His knob-twiddling squiggles work brilliantly with the hot-cool structure of Fluffy (I Want You); on I Am Alive he conjures up electronic banjo nightmares. And for The King of Aberdeen he operates a hand-held controller (like a Playstation mbira). Leafcutter John adds sonic, anti-jazz danger to Polar Bear's sound, and the crowd love him.
Yet what they are playing is Euro-jazz; Rochford's tunes encompass military swagger, tongue-in-cheek pomp and acoustic drum'n'bass. Polar Bear swing hard, and blow in the most compelling way. When improvising a coda (to Goodbye) from sustained notes and drones, they have the confidence to develop it for a nice length of time before diving into the rattling, honking Urban Kilt. This has a hint of Wareham's Acoustic Ladyland (three-quarters of whom play in Polar Bear).
Rochford thanks his bandmates. He's still inaudible. Between announcements, however, his band is reshaping the vocabulary and grammar of British jazz.
