Seymour Wright, Steve Noble, Pat Thomas and John Edwards
Cafe Oto, Hackney, London

JUST outside Cafe Oto, along Dalston Lane, is the huge and marvellous mural of a Hackney Carnival; all musicians soaring, all people dancing, all colours coalescing.

So I was hearing music in my head as I passed the momentous image, preparing me for the sounds I was to hear inside the Cafe Oto’s old industrial walls.

It was Derby alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, Hounslow-born bassist John Edwards and drummer and pianist from the Thames Valley, Steve Noble and Pat Thomas; all in powerful creative fettle.

How much is the unfettered sound of the saxophone like human life struggling to free itself? Wright’s horn exploded with snorts, howls, cries of release, suspirations, shrieks and wailing guffaws of the search for sonic freedom, all in the joyous agony of his hornsound.

Noble’s meteoric wrists of fire scorched his drums and melted his cymbals with sticks, brushes and mallets: Edwards’s plucking fury was a visual and timbral blur as his fingers leapt up and down his strings, and Thomas’s storms of strikes along his keys and strumming of the piano’s innards preceded a succession of chimes which took its listeners’ ears back a century to New Orleans and Joe King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s pioneering Chimes Blues, now ringing through the Hackney night.

Full of the present in the future, but never far from tradition, and as I walked to get the bus and stared at the mural high above me again, I knew that what I had heard and what I was seeing was the same human struggle.

For more information see cafeoto.co.uk