Soil & “Pimp” Sessions

Venue:

The Lantern, Bristol

Date: 04/07/2015

Japan’s Soil & “Pimp” Sessions are self proclaimed purveyors of “death jazz”. While that may conjure up visions of John Zorn skronking nightmares, there’s nothing here to frighten the horses. The musical lineup of drums, double bass, piano, sax and trumpet is not unusual, but S&P have a secret weapon in their frontman Shacho. He’s not a singer (apart from some spoken word on one number) – his description in the line up is “Agitator”, but really he’s an old-fashioned hypeman, like Flava Flav getting onstage on a cooking night at Birdland. He drives the band and the crowd all night and it’s impossible not to be bowled over by him. The music is high octane jazz played with energy, verve and tons of enthusiasm, as well as no little virtuosity. The brass section barely stop moving over the stage all night, and the whole thing is relentless, exhilarating and uplifting.

The audience:

About 200 people in a 400 capacity room, but there was no hanging around the edges – everybody was down the front, and making enough noise for 2000 people. It’s always magic when you’re part of crowd that is getting so into a show, and a band is feeding off that and throwing it straight back out.

It made me think..

This probably went straight into the top ten gigs I’ve ever seen. They are doing more UK gigs this week. If they are anywhere near you, for the love of God, go see them!

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