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 acoustic ladyland interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Punky jazz? Jazzy punk? Oh, who cares. It’s Saturday night and four young musicians are rocking out in front of a packed crowd in an East London bar. Nothing unusual then, except there’s not a guitar in sight. Instead, it’s a saxophone leading the barrage of adrenelin-fuelled funk and it’s former Young Jazz Musician Of The Year, Peter Wareham, at the controls. “I think barriers between genres are getting broken down a little bit,” he says. “For us it’s not an outlandish thing to merge different styles of music. But other people seem to be making quite a fuss about it.”The fuss comes in part from a realization that Acoustic Ladyland and other acts on the London jazz scene, such as Polar Bear and Jade Fox, are making exciting music that’s blurring boundaries and hitting home with non-jazz audiences. They look as edgy as many a garage rock band too, and cite similar references - Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and drill‘n’bass maestro Venetian Snares among them. Add to that their awesome musicianship (drummer Seb Rochford is up for two BBC Jazz Awards this year and keyboardist Tom Cawley is also a former Young Jazz Musician Of The Year) and it’s a pretty fuss-worthy combination. But is it anything new? “I just wondered what it would sound like to play punk rock on jazz instruments. Then I realised it was quite new when I couldn’t find any real evidence of it, apart from people like Morphine,” says Pete. Seb the drummer, a man of more hair than words, adds, “There have been people that have done it, like John Zorn. It’s all about not defining boundaries. It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day - if it’s good it’s good, and it’s nice to have the freedom to do whatever you want.”  And it’s their raw musical talent that gives them that freedom. Unlike many current acts, they’re not constrained by their abilities to play in just one style, or even one band - Seb also drums for eccentric rockers Menlo Park and leads the hotly-tipped jazz quartet Polar Bear (in which Wareham plays tenor sax), while bassist Tom Herbert is co-leader of the equally genre-blurring Jade Fox. They also belong to the F-ire Collective, a London-based group of musicians founded by saxophonist Barak Schmool. “We were all finding it hard to get into certain venues as individuals,” explains Pete. “So he thought, let’s get together as a Collective and collaborate to do a series of nights in a venue where you wouldn’t be able to get a one-off gig”. This self-sufficient approach is refreshing in an industry often guilty of packaging talent into pigeonholes before it’s had a chance to mature. No wonder it’s yielding unclassifiable results.
Alastair Lee
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