SLATE TRIO - OCTO

 

Here’s another heaping helping of instrumental invention from guitarist Neil Smith, this time with the Slate Trio. It’s a Bristol-based outfit for which fellow The Brackish member and drummer Matthew Jones teams with Smith and bassist Alex Heane. Octo is reminiscent of the kind of deviant jazz Eric Dolphy pioneered with Out to Lunch in 1964; cubist blocks of rhythm and harmony staggering precipitously as much as free flowing, with as much implied pulse as straight meter. The rhythmic scaffolding that Jones and Heane erect is not so tantalizingly wobbly as Richard Davis and Tony Williams’ efforts for Dolphy, but plastic enough for Smith to append other materials he has affinities for: psychedelia, systems music, motorik, funk and Afrobeat. As the title suggests, Octo features eight substantial tracks – none under six minutes in length – that combine composition and improvisation in novel ways.

For all its title suggests despondency over a declining welfare state, opener ‘Hippies Need Houses’ has a deceptively light quality, the trio handling its metrical intricacy with ease. Following a statement of theme, the group settles into a standard jazz pattern of traded solos – guitar followed by bass and then drums.  This familiar style of apportioned solos repeats in various combinations and successions across the album, but within radically different rhythmic and stylistic contexts.

‘King of New York’ follows a mutant Afro-Cuban rhythm which Smith’s solo has teetering on the verge of chaos with a pointillistic passage featuring pizzicato guitar and bass notes climbing and descending into space. ‘Mr. Fing’ opens pulseless with sawed bass drone. A pattering snare pattern with countrified syncopation propels guitar work that opens impressionistic patches of mystery seen from a locomotive train window. ‘Empty House’ hosts more of Alex Heane’s bowing technique (including imitation seagull cries) and volume swelled guitar chords that recall Allan Holdsworth’s ambient touch. It’s a gentle mood piece that doesn’t quite achieve the aesthetic heights of Carla Bley’s gorgeous ballad ‘Lawns’, but captures something of its magical, Zen-like balance of relaxation and melancholy.

‘Slated’ is more angularly agitated and rocking. Smith contributes a wild, distorted solo ably goaded by Jones that enters areas of abstraction like Nels Cline or Mary Halvorson at their most delay unhinged or the buzzy distortion of John McLaughlin’s dubbed up rampages on Miles Davis’ Big Fun. The main riff of ‘Hour of Zog’ taps into a funkiness redolent of the John Scofield Trio while in ‘BS7’ Heane solos over Smith’s mechano-highlife guitar patterns. ‘Augmented’ employs the scale of the title to excavate layers of dreamy tension, Smith’s solo throwing out chips of sharp dissonance.

Recorded live in one day at Joe's Garage, Bristol, Octo benefits from a mixture of rawness and precision. This psychedelic reinvention of the trio format enables Smith and Jones to indulge their jazz urges more than they can in the more post-rock leaning strictures of The Brackish. Here they sound off the hook and, with Heane, keen to keep pushing back the fusion-expanded boundaries of an art form in its second century of robust reconstitution.

Text (C) Copyright by Jon Kromka 2026

Octo is out now on Pig Records and available through Bandcamp: 

https://pigrecords.bandcamp.com/album/octo