Trevor Watts' Original Drum Orchestra: The Art Is In The Rhythm Volume 2

A co-founder of London's pioneering Spontaneous Music Ensemble with drummer John Stevens in the mid 1960s, saxophonist Trevor Watts has straddled an unusually wide spectrum of genres. With SME he explored an area of free jazz which, in deliberate contrast to contemporary American adventurers such as Ornette Coleman or members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, wholly rejected melody and rhythm. At the other end of the spectrum Watts has been involved in jazz rock.

Somewhere between those extremes comes Trevor Watts' Original Drum Orchestra. Formed in the early 1980s, TWODO's drum and percussion-rich performances were improvised without any previous discussion between the musicians while keeping melody and motor rhythms close to their hearts.

Although Watts has always been clear that TWODO was not attempting to play African-inspired jazz, or focus on traditional African rhythms, two West African drummer-percussionists were essential to the group's sound. Originally these were Nana Tsiboe, from Ghana, and Mamadi Kamara, from Sierra Leone, but by the time the 2-CD live recording The Art Is In The Rhythm Volume 2 was made in 1989, Kamara had been replaced by Kofi Adu, an old friend of Tsiboe's from Ghana. The group is completed by kit drummer Liam Genockey, whose roots were in rock, the classically trained violinist Peter Knight, South African bassist Ernest Mothle, perhaps best known for his work with his fellow South African exile, saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, and Watts on alto and soprano.

In the sleeve notes for this well recorded but previously unreleased album, Watts points to an early inspiration for TWODO, Morocco's Master Musicians of Joujouka, whom he saw perform at London's Commonwealth Institute in 1980. "It's the only time seeing a concert has moved me to tears," writes Watts. "There was a feeling of community in the music that we, as a society, seemed to have lost. It was wonderful, sensual music. There was a real spur for me to travel and play music in other parts of the world." (In June 2023, with immaculate synchronicity, the Master Musicians performed again in London within days of The Art Is In The Rhythm Volume 2 being released. A review of that gig can be read here).

Sometimes, fleetingly, the music on this album resembles that of the Master Musicians, as the combination of Watts' soprano and Knight's violin takes on the high-end wailing sound of the Master Musicians' double-reed rhaitas while the three drummers/percussionists lock into a vaguely Maghrebi cross rhythm. But most of the time, TWODO sounds like nothing other than its idiosyncratic itself, collectively created music that is bigger and deeper than the sum of its parts.