Jake Long: City Swamp

Drummer, composer and producer Jake Long's house-rocking City Swamp is part of a trilogy of post-2022 albums out of London's underground jazz scene which are connected by adjacent sources of inspiration, identical creative processes, and crossovers of personnel. Synchronicity and zeitgeist are writ large and, much of the time, in neon. The other two albums are drummer Tom Skinner's Voices Of Bishara (Brownswood, 2022) and London Brew's London Brew (Concord, 2023). City Swamp and London Brew both take their jump-off points from Miles Davis' electric bands of the late 1960s and 1970s; Voices Of Bishara grew out of a one-off performance at the Brilliant Corners bar which used Tony Williams's Life Time (Blue Note, 1965) as its launch pad. All three albums were created using extended studio jams followed by radical cut-up and reconstruction surgery, the process pioneered by Davis' electric-era producer Teo Macero.

Long is best known as the leader of Maisha, adepts of spiritual jazz, who debuted with There Is A Place (Brownswood) in 2018 and went on to record with Gary Bartz on Night Dreamer Direct-to-Disc Sessions (Night Dreamer) in 2020. For City Swamp, Long assembled a band with Maisha musicians at its core: tenor saxophonist and flautist Nubya Garcia, guitarist Shirley Tetteh, keyboardist Amané Suganami , bassist Twm Dylan and percussionist Tim Doyle. These players are augmented by tenor saxophonist Binker Golding, baritone saxophonist Tamar Osborn, B3 organist Artie Zaitz and pianist Al Macsween. It is a killer crew and all its members will be familiar to regular readers of these pages.

City Swamp connects to the jazz-rock vibe that Miles Davis explored, but does so in a less artful and more unabashed manner than did Davis. Davis was not comfortable in a rock groove. It was simply not his thing, though in pursuit of record sales he tried to disguise the fact. (For more on this, read Miles Davis & Don Cherry: Which One Is The Grifter? here.) Long on the other hand is home from home and unafraid of getting primal. City Swamp also stands apart from such albums as Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) through Long's embrace of the dub techniques of first-generation Jamaican producers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry.

The quickest way to get a handle on the album is by checking the YouTube below, which is of lead single "Silhouette," built around Shirley Tetteh and Twm Dylan's looping riff.

Long describes City Swamp as a "dystopian suite" addressing the architectural and social butchery being inflicted on London by venal property developers and other bloodsuckers from the Dark Side. In this parish, however, it sounds more like a terrific full-throttle jazz-rock romp with a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.