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Dalston nights to remember
CHRIS SEARLE reviews Rachel Musson and Charlotte Keeffe at Cafe Oto

TENOR saxophonist Rachel Musson, playing at Cafe Oto with drummer Mark Sanders and bassist Olie Brice, creates an adventure with every solo: excitation, lyricism and deep creative beauty.

Her sound spans a century of jazz, from the rococo circles and slap-tongue phrases of New Orleans; the relentless engine of Coleman Hawkins, the vision of Coltrane to the sheer audacity and seamless power of Evan Parker. You can hear it all.

With Sanders’s hearkening, listening and responding drums and Brice’s depth of sonic dance, the trio make precious union, their giving and receiving of sounds making music as it should ever be: co-operative and steeped in all the resources of the blood and brain.

Four nights later and four more free-playing troubadours — Charlotte Keeffe’s Right Here, Right Now Quartet. Keeffe plays trumpet as you have never heard it before, finding tenderness and passion in outrageous overblowing, underblowing, yet within the contradictions of her sound are the very contours of musical spirit.

Alongside Moss Freed’s guitar, Ashley John Long’s bass and Ben Handysides’s drums, her horn squeals, rampages, roars, subsides, laments, celebrates and virtually vaporises. “Just start with breathing,” she declares.

But she is an entertainer too, there is nothing staid about her improvisations and artistry. Remembering her Boston childhood, her version of The Lincolnshire Poacher, with drums and guitar picking out the theme, the quartet forges choruses of delight, bringing back my boyhood when we used to sing to the same tune: “Get out of here with a boom-de-boom,/Before I call a cop!”

And in her composition Wholeness, from the quartet’s new album, suddenly sounds of violin, alto sax and flugelhorn peal out from the audience in a blissful and collective surprise.

Human sounds from all corners, everywhere: music of the soul on a freezing Dalston night.

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