Troykart
The Constitution in Camden is an unassuming Pub. I feel like I’ve never seen it in daylight, even though I definitely have. Its cellar, which opens up onto the towpath of the Grand Union Canal, is home to one of the most progressive and intimate jazz nights in London, organised and curated by trumpeter Richard Turner. The music is of a consistently high standard and the audience is rarely without a handful of London’s jazz elite. A few weeks ago, Jazz @ The Con Cellar celebrated its third birthday.
Opening the evening with a solo set was saxophonist James Allsop. He has such facility that for breathless minutes he blows away and there is nothing he cannot do. While his command over the instrument is impressive, there is a level of communication in his playing that is as inanely beautiful as the bric-a-brac surroundings of the Camden basement.
Like, yeah, man. {ginger between sushi}
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rice rice rice (no rice – con cellar birthday buffet)
enter Troyka.
(Chris Montague, Kit Downes and Josh Blackmore – all brilliant)
Guitarist Montague introduces one of the tracks: “this is a song by Nirvana” and I automatically flash back to some guys who used to play together before school band every Wednesday afternoon.
They always played Smells Like Teen Spirit.
They never sang.
It was never very good.
But it always had us mesmerized: the little kids, who were too young to have known about it all when it actually happened.
And then we all got Nevermind. Except I didn’t. I think they had sold out of Nevermind at HMV and I had to settle for an on-sale copy of In Utero from Modern Music in Abingdon. I listened to this album non-stop for ages. I remember having it in my discman on the bus to orchestra every Saturday morning. I loved it. While everyone else in class was discussing Come As You Are and Polly, I had to bluff along the conversation. They didn’t care for Serve the Servants or Rape Me.
Troyka weren’t playing Lithium or In Bloom: Troyka were playing Heart Shaped Box. Troyka were my new best friends.
Their disconcertingly bipolar sound revealed more about this music than I had ever noticed before. They showed me – or rather my fourteen-year-old self, also at the gig – that there are many dimensions to Nirvana’s songs which have not been explored. Heart Shaped Box demonstrated Troyka’s powers to me in a way other tunes couldn’t have: While there were even more exciting moments in their set, the fact that this song is embedded so deep in my memory made me listen very closely. I wanted to know why they had chosen it…
Nirvana’s music is one of extremes: From the eerily quiet to the painfully loud, the pretty and delicate to the noisy and indestructible. One of the things Troyka did was expand this to include crushing leaps in tempo and the ingenious improvisation which makes all of their performances so engrossing. The result was a musically distinct yet hair-growingly familiar rendition of one of my forgotten all-time favourites.
Of course, such musical development can be heard in all of Troyka’s work, and it reaches fantastic extremes of its own in their original compositions. However, in Heart Shaped Box I could hear the investigation I had always wanted into music I had not really listened to in nearly a decade.
- Soon after the gig, I listened to In Utero all the way through, twice in a row. And I loved it. Twice. I have since lifted my embargo on Seattle.
P.S. For a ruthless defence against the jokey-jazz-cover-of-a-pop-song accusation, look no further than The Bad Plus’ blog.
