Eve Libertine

★★★★ Jack Kerouac’s ‘Sea’

ONE LITTLE INDIAN. CD/DL

Who imagined Crass would go jazz? Yet as with Penny Rimbaud’s moving readings of Wilfred Owen’s war poems, ‘Sea’ makes perfect sense. Captured at 2013’s London Jazz Festival, Libertine slips lithely between anguished growls and wide-eyed howls to give gravitas to the intense nervous breakdown at the heart of Kerouac’s beat odyssey as piano, strings and brass ebb and flow in a stirring depiction of the Pacific’s “big frigging shadows”.