Land Locked Jazz

To obvious English ears, Eastern European music has a perceived tendency to the wild, psychotic, deranged, threatening. Of course, that only tells us so much about the elements of the English psyche that have been firmly denied and/or projected onto foreign musics.

These two groups were great fun; engaging, dedicated to their respective sounds, with no attitude toward their audience other than appreciation that they had one.

The bearded singer of Uz Jsme Doma made an excellent introduction: "It's great to be playing here in London at our first concert in the UK. However we have played in 57 different countries up to this point, so let's not get too excited about that..."

A couple of wild and extremely drunk Czech youths gyrated in front of us, ensuring a decent sized cordon sanitaire around them as those protecting their eye-wateringly expensive lager moved aside.

The aforementioned Uz Jsme Doma (Now We As At Home, my Czech-descended friend Simon tells me) were a bracing blast of punky post-Beefheart, with an excellent song that sounded like it was called "Siva A Schiva". That's unlikely to be real Czech there, though. They also did a nice shouted ballad about the time when there were Czech seafarers.

Much of the audience departed about then, including about half our compadres, muttering about "I ****ing hate ****ing jazz, you ****ing know I won't ****ing listen to it".

I really have no critical language to talk about jazz, which I think helps. The Contemporary Noise Sextet were just a very listenable modern jazz group. Drums, piano, and bass set up a rhythm: saxes, horns and guitars strike up a pleasant 5- or 7-note melody; melody breaks down into freeform soloing; city-scape back-projection works nicely with this: horns come back to the melody again, via some gurning from the guitarist and some so-happy-it-hurts smiling from the pianist. Simon and I kept wondering: Shall we make a run to the pub? No, let's catch one more by this lot.