Tony Oxley: Unreleased 1974 - 2016

The British drummer and bandleader Tony Oxley passed in 2023, aged 85, after a career which began in the mid 1960s as the drummer in the house band at Ronnie Scott's club. From this prestigious but relatively codified platform, Oxley soon steered into less travelled waters. In 1969 he was in the quartet which recorded John McLaughlin's debut album, Extrapolation (Polydor). In the early 1970s, he began adding ring modulators, tone generators and other fx tools to his assemblage of drums and metal percussion, and electronics remained a fundamental part of his thing. Alongside career-long iterations of his own band, Oxley recorded with many fellow explorers from both sides of the Atlantic including Derek Bailey, Paul Bley, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann, Gavin Bryars, Bill Dixon (five albums during the 1990s), Bill Evans, Tomasz Stańko, Cecil Taylor (a dozen albums from 1989 onwards)... and Vangelis. The list goes on.

And so does the beat. Unreleased 1974—2016 begins with three tracks recorded with bassist Barry Guy, trumpeter Dave Holdsworth, pianist Howard Riley and trombonist Paul Rutherford, recorded in 1974 but not edited into their final composed forms until decades later. The album ends with a duo track recorded in 2016 with acoustic percussionist Stefan Hoelker.

These are all daring and more or less sui generis pieces of music, full of delightful sonic surprises—but they bookend what is perhaps the highlight of the album, "Frame." This extended (14:53) track was recorded in 1981 with Howard Riley, saxophonist Larry Stabbins, guitarist Hugh Metcalfe, and violinist/electronicist Phil Wachsmann. An influential figure across several strands of British jazz, whose importance to the music is only now beginning to receive its proper due, Stabbins in 2024 returned from a self-imposed exile which had begun in 2013—a principled departure which is discussed in a review of his comeback album Strangeness Oscillation (Noetic, 2024) here and a review of the Tony Oxley Quintet's Angular Apron (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2024) here.

On "Frame," Stabbins plays what he describes as "some of the best and most extreme saxophone I ever recorded"—actually some of the best and most extreme saxophone anyone ever recorded. Wholly idiosyncratic, independent of headline extreme-saxophonists from Albert Ayler and David S. Ware to Peter Brötzmann, it is exciting listening.

P.S. For more about why Stabbins went to sea in 2013, read the feature-length article We Out Here: The Fast-Forward Evolution Of British Jazz here, written in 2019, before Stabbins decided to come ashore again.

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