Alister Spence Trio

| Live | Alister Spence Music ASM004

Whenever this band’s drama, invention, energy and repetition-based voodoo suddenly drops away to Toby Hall’s glockenspiel I am transported back to a world where teddybears and tip-trucks were as big as I was, and reality was a dull place peopled by adults. This little instrument turns the music into a toy-land of marvels and phantoms: make-believe music, sometimes enhanced by Alister Spence’s samples and music box. Not that what happens the rest of the time dumps us into a dull adult world: over the last two decades Spence (piano), Hall (drums) and Lloyd Swanton (bass) have edged away from being a straight jazz piano trio, arriving at an improvising language more about moods and casting spells than chord progressions and virtuosic role-playing. But they can also groove like hell.