Elliot Galvin
The Influencing Machine
(Edition EDN 1103)

ROCHESTER-BORN 27-year-old pianist Elliot Galvin is a powerful jazz musician who also has a deep commitment to studying history, a love for reading and emulating literature within his music and is grounded in a new hope for the socialist politics set free and made real and possible by Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the leadership of the Labour Party.

These layers of artistic and political formation radiate from his music and expressly from the new album from his trio, intriguingly titled The Influencing Machine.

This is a historical reference to the bizarre and finally tragic life of James Tilly Matthews, a man of many selves, from revolutionary double agent during the years of the French Revolution to being the first documented paranoid schizophrenic committed to London’s Bethlehem (Bedlam) psychiatric hospital in 1797, who, beleaguered by terrifying mental distress, believed he was being controlled by “an influencing machine” which “controls our lives. It writes our news, our history, the script of our dreams. Crowns our kinds, draws our borders and leads the charge to war. It traps us in towering cages where we sing to everyone and no-one.”

How much of this is now-times, instantly recognisable all around us and inside us, and absolutely our world as Blake, the genius also branded insane, and his “mind-forg’d manacles” are, from his poem London of 1794, three years before Tilly Matthews’s Bedlam incarceration.

In his trio — the same threesome of his previous 2016 album Punch — Glaswegian drummer Corrie Dick and the prodigious and resonating young bassist Tom McCredie, Galvin’s piano and assorted keyboards build layers of ever-surprising sounds, create hokum with voices, electronics and toy instruments a little like Jelly Roll Morton did on tunes like Sidewalk Blues and Dead Man Blues with his Red Hot Peppers 90 years ago.

For with subtle sonic links, timbral allusions and references to shared history Galvin creates oblique references through sound and notes — as his hero James Joyce did through words in Ulysses, which the pianist calls his “revelation” text — to this world in which we all live and struggle, incontrovertibly now, for there is nothing either formulaic or ornamental about this album.

Take the first track, New Model Army, its quasi-anthemic theme recalling the Cromwellian times of the Levellers, Diggers and the Putney debates.

Galvin’s piano, McCredie’s bowed bass with Dick’s tapping percussion and the millennial electronics almost submerge the choric Chilean undertow of “The people united will never be defeated.”

But it is there, reminding us that the divided selves of our millions make us prey to the influencing machines of purveyors from Donald Trump to Boris Johnson to Simon Cowell in the politics and culture of our multisurfaced age with its raw barbarism thath must be unified and healed.

Galvin told me of his grandfather, a Sheffield communist who, among the many, marched and organised towards the “Society of Universal Harmony,” which is the name of the album’s fourth track.
The repeated echoes of people’s marches in Galvin’s tunes suggest a society and its people in progress towards a just and communal life in real times.

In the strangely titled Bees, Dogs and Flies, for example, or in Boys’ Club, where Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which Paul Robeson used to sing with its opening line “Build a road of peace before us, Build it wide and deep and long,” makes a repeated allusion and you think of Robeson’s dream, Jeremy’s dream, the Galvin trio’s dream and our dream in the lyrics’ great climax.

“Speed the slow and check the eager
Help the weak and curb the strong.
None shall push beside another
None shall let another fall —
March beside me, sister, brother
All for one, and one for all!”

In truth, I’ve surprised myself in the route I’ve travelled in this review and where it’s taken me — the complexities and undercurrents of Galvin’s music are manifold and multistructured, with each sonic stratum discovering more meanings.

I’m a septuagenarian and these three musicians are still in their twenties and yet there are insights that can unite us all.

Galvin told me that his is an artist’s now-times responsibility to reveal, investigate and clarify the divisions all around us, while reflecting a sense of hope that we all can engage with them and change them.

He certainly does that in The Influencing Machine and it makes you look forward and keenly to the subtle messaging that may well be found in the albums that follow.