PEACE, LOVE AND POETRY! THE HEALING JAZZ ADVENTURES OF ALABASTER DEPLUME
“THANK YOU for being a human!” says Alabaster DePlume as our Zoom call begins. “Thank you for living!” A skinny, hyperactive, Manchesterborn thirty-something composer, saxophonist and activist, Alabaster, or Gus Fairbairn to use his given name, is equally at ease asking MOJO questions (“What do you think people need, Andrew?”) as answering them, and punctuates the interview with such encouraging statements as, “Thank you for working in journalism. Such noble work!”
Unlikely exhortations have been part of Alabaster’s music and poetry since he started recording in the early noughties, though most fans probably discovered him via 2020’s compilation of non-vocal works, To Cy & Lee:
Instrumentals Vol. 1. A serene, delicate collection, assembled from eight years’ worth of under-the-radar releases, it called to mind everything from the hovering lightness of Ethiopian jazz to the gossamer melodies of Celtic and Japanese folk, and struck a chord with a multitude of listeners in the early days of lockdown, many of whom sent Fairbairn heartfelt messages of thanks.
“It felt like a strange, warm lightness but also a weight of responsibility,” says Fairbairn. “I put it out to create calm, but I didn’t know there was going to be a pandemic.
That was not part of my plan.”
Raised in Manchester by teacher parents, Fairbairn was a heavy metal kid who recorded a “goofy pathetic” heavy metal LP while still a teenager, before leaving home to travel the world as an itinerant poet, “Completely drunk all the time,” he says. “Stomping around the audience screaming about my pig. It was ridiculous.”
Fairbairn became an accompanist for Manc singer-songwriter Liz Green. “I was her saxophonist around Europe,” he says. “That’s how I learned to play softly because Liz is very quiet.” While In Manchester, Fairbairn also worked for the Ordinary Lifestyles charity, teaching adults with learning disabilities, including two men called Cy and Lee. “We added music-making to part of our work, music that would embody a certain calm.”
Eventually, realising a fearless break needed to be made, Fairbairn moved to London and found a home for himself at Hackney music collective, The Total Refreshment Centre. “This community changed my life,” he says. “I did a show to launch my album Peach in December 2015, with lots of different performers, and they said I should do that every month. I started giving ownership to the musicians, to make it interesting because I couldn’t do the same gig every month. It became my job to discover what was going on in London every night.”
That’s how Fairbairn became a driving force in the London jazz scene, collaborating with drummer Sarathy Korwar and The Comet Is Coming and Soccer96 linchpin Danalogue. It’s also how he managed to enlist a different set of musicians every day for two weeks to record his forthcoming magnum opus, Gold. Underpinned by the mantra of “I will not be safe, I will be magical” and distilled from 17 hours of music, Gold moves from the serene to the chaotic, the restive to the restful, incorporating everything from sinewy Fela-style funk exhortations and hungry post-punk bewitchments to ethereal ECM gospel jazz, and cinematic collectivist lullabies. “If the reason for To Cy & Lee was to help people have peace,” says Fairbairn, “the reason to make Gold is to give people courage and love. It’s how I made it, it’s what it’s about. It’s what we need next.”
Alabaster DePlume’s Gold is released by Lost Map/ International Anthem on March 12.
“It is about courage and love.” ALABASTER DEPLUME