Tony Oxley Quintet: Angular Apron

Among the most welcome jazz events of 2024 is the return to active duty of the great British saxophonist Larry Stabbins following an absence of over a decade. Stabbins went into voluntary exile in 2013, after around thirty-five years at the deep end of British jazz. Disenchanted with the culturally regressive direction in which the music and its ecology seemed to be heading, he even went so far as selling his tenor. But things change, and towards the end of the 2010s Stabbins took heart from the musically and politically progressive young players who were emerging in numbers approaching critical mass. In summer 2024 he announced his return with the electronica-infused post-genre album Strangeness Oscillation (Noetic), reviewed here.

Another early fruit of Stabbins' return is Angular Apron, a previously unissued recording of a spectacular one-off performance by an international quintet assembled by the pioneering British drummer Tony Oxley for a gig at the Ruhr Jazz Festival in 1992. Stabbins is on soprano and tenor, Manfred Schoof on trumpet and flugelhorn, Pat Thomas on piano and Sirone on bass. There is electronica, too. In the early 1970s, not long after appearing on John McLaughlin's Extrapolation (Polydor, 1969), Oxley began adding ring modulators, tone generators and other fx tools to his assemblage of drums and metal percussion. Thomas was another early adopter of electronica and he and Oxley mix it up on Angular Apron.

A 64:43 performance of a piece Oxley first recorded in 1989 as a member of a trio led by Anthony Braxton, for whom it was written, Angular Apron is a landmark album. Another of 2024's most welcome events was the August release of the posthumous Wayne Shorter Quartet album Celebration Volume 1 (Blue Note, reviewed here). Listening to that album sounds like cruising through space on Starship Shorter, watching an unfolding panorama of quasars, suns, star systems and new life-forms pass by. Angular Apron is another space odyssey, but this one sounds like being present during the actual creation of the solar system. Huge events occur, massive energy fields join together, planets take shape, towering comets loom into view, black holes are born, solar storms blaze. The scale of the music is galactic, and the detail within it is atomic.

The sound quality of the album is as spectacular as the music itself. Big. Punchy. Epic. Star bright. It helped that the recording was mastered using 2024 rather than 1992 technology. Stabbins found a cassette recording taken from the PA desk when he was going through some old tapes in 2022. The sound was pretty rough but he digitized it and sent it to Oxley, who agreed it should be released. Stabbins worked on it with his Cubase program and sent the final result to the Corbett Vs. Dempsey label in Chicago. Stabbins says he was "amazed" when they used his mastering, because he had never mastered a disc before. (AAJ says he could make a second career as a mastering engineer if he felt like it.)

Sadly, Tony Oxley passed in December 2023. Attributing opinions to people who are no longer with us is a no-no. That said, it is as certain as can be that Oxley would love this album.

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