KT Reeder: 2021 Jazz

Jazz has always defied convention, its improvisational nature eliciting as much opprobrium as ovation. Ironically, given the libertarian philosophy that underpins it, those who play, critique or listen aren't always so receptive to change, to boundaries being forced, to new territory being mapped out. Remember, there were many who didn't dig bebop at first, many others who decried the free jazz movement pioneered by Ornette Coleman, and still more who baulked at fusion. All have since been accepted as seminal movements within the evolving history of the genre.

British trombonist KT Reeder is a maverick who evokes extreme reactions in jazz circles. And he wouldn't have it any other way. "I enjoy it when small groups of people who do similar things to me understand my work, and when most people don't understand my work, absolutely hate it," he says.

Enigmatically, Reeder rejects the term jazz when it's used to describe what he does, preferring to see jazz as who he is. His touchstones are avant-garde figures such as Martin Archer and Lawrence Casserly, or Raymond Lee Parker and Paul Whitty from the field recording and sonic art community.

Yet his album, perhaps provocatively, is entitled 2021 Jazz. Comprising one eponymously-titled track running at just over 37 minutes, it does exactly what jazz should do, challenging the listener to park preconceptions about form and structure—even melody—to inhabit Reeder's conceptual world. This is a world where dissonant electronics provide a disturbing undercurrent to a diversity of trombone exclamations. A world that reflects the world in the here and now, unhinged, uncertain and unravelling post-pandemic, a world disappearing inside smaller worlds delineated by tribal allegiance to nationality and race and religion, and servile to avarice.

2021 Jazz could well be the soundtrack to this world. It's as irresistibly dark as jazz gets.

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