John Edwards and Mark Sanders
Nisus Duets (Emanem 4094) 
John Butcher and John Edwards 
Optic (Emanem 4039) 
John Edwards 
Volume (psi 08.09)
 

STRANGE how a boyhood encounter with a two-stringed ukulele could have sparked the formation of one of Britain’s finest improvising bassists.

John Edwards was born in Hounslow, west London, in 1964. His elder brother played drums in a punk band and John would add to the rhythm on the front room chair arms.

When he picked up the ukulele, he made bass lines by plucking its two strings as if it were a bass guitar.

He went to art school at 16 and began to play an unplugged bass guitar, making music in friends’ garages.

His grandmother bequeathed him £350 and he spent it on his first acoustic bass, at a time when he was becoming drawn towards the jazz improvisation of London-based stalwarts like Lol Coxhill and Bruce Turner.

From 1987 onwards, while playing in groups like Pointy Birds, B Shops for the Poor, GOD and The Honkies, Edwards also played with powerful improvisers like Coxhill, Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols and since the min-90s he has become internationally recognised as one of his instrument’s true masters, with regular performances and tours with veterans like Louis Moholo-Moholo, Joe McPhee and Evan Parker, as well as younger players like Tony Bevan and Alexander Hawkins.

One of his long-time improvising partners is drummer Mark Sanders and they combined in July 2002 to record Nisus Duets for the Eminem label.

In his sleeve notes Martin Davidson reminds us that, “in the good old jazz age, bass and drums would have been considered to be the ‘rhythm section’ or ‘backing group’ — not instruments to be featured in their own right.”

Certainly not so here. Edwards and Sanders are the prime and only act, their sounds creatively brilliant and co-operatively joyous.

Each title is a participle of inventive action, beginning with Pointing. Edwards’s bass whines, howls and exclaims through his ever-sawing bow while Sanders’s pointillistic percussion snaps and showers scuttling sounds all around.

The title alliteration continues through the album, on to Painting, where Edwards’s bass shudders in unheard sound while Sanders’s bell-like effects and brushed drums seem to be supporting the breathing of a rasping comrade.

Panting is an exposition of Edwards’s phenomenal earthen plucking and Sanders’s dancing brushwork, an extraordinary example of contrasts in harmony,  while in Peeling the listener steps inside the mind and note-choices of the bassist while Sanders, for whom listening is as much of his art as playing, shows a cosmos of responses.

The last track is Parting, its elegiac edge enhanced by its own initial quietude, its sounds being born through a living silence.

In 2001 in Brussels and 2002 in Barcelona, Edwards recorded another duo album, this time with the Brighton-born saxophonist and seasoned improviser John Butcher from two live performances. Called Optic, it seems an uncanny title for a work of astonishing artistry very much for the ears.

The 27 minutes of the Brussels performance, titled Cocktail Bar, is an amalgam of the original, with Butcher’s horn radiating the beauty of the totally unexpected and every note of Edwards a message of the unknown.

Yet together they forge a unity that is entirely in sonic shape and coherence. Together they teach the listener how to listen.

As for the Barcelona tracks, Edwards can sound close to subterranean as he does in Grottes I or Plate XI, while his notes simultaneously vibrate in the sky and, with Butcher’s soundscapes making extinct birdsong alive again, together they make all elements new.

From two to one and in 2008, Edwards made his solo album Volume for Evan Parker’s psi label, a first among the upwards of a century of recording sessions in which he has taken part.

Marek Tuszynski’s sleeve note fable, in which she describes the musicians “that bring the deepest sounds as those able to vibrate enemies to tears,” is entirely apt for Edwards’s virtuosity and the album seethes with a universe of sound.

Hear the utterly compelling Pin Drop where Edwards’s pulsating strings and hollow wood make you see nature emerge from darkness or Sprung, a piece of music that humanises sound to such a degree that one man’s quest for notes becomes the life of a people, there in Houslow, here in Sheffield or anywhere on the planet.

I’m just very pleased he found that two-stringed ukulele all those years ago.