Summary
"We've been really busy in Australia and Europe," explains double bassist Lloyd Swanton, who formed the band in the late 1980s with pianist and New Zealand native Chris Abrahams and drummer Tony Buck. "We're a small operation and found we were at capacity just tackling our obligations in those areas." The Necks did play a prominent concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in October 2001 - immediately after the World Trade Center attack. "For a while, it looked like the concert wouldn't happen, but they let it go on, and it was great."
The Necks' latest release, Townsville, epitomizes everything that's so perfect about their intense yet level-headed approach to improvising. As is usual for them, it's a single hour-long piece (recorded live at a concert in Queensland), comprised of repetitive, cyclical motifs that build so imperceptibly and glacially that Buck doesn't even touch most of his kit until nearly the end, preferring to focus on tapping his cymbals. Meanwhile, Abrahams spins out dense, swirly note clusters around Swanton's smoky bottom-end, with an effect critics have likened to the tide gradually coming in, reaching a peak only within the last five minutes."I wouldn't try to convince anyone that we're reinventing the wheel, but our modus operandi is simply to wait until one of us comes up with an idea, and then the others fall in with their contributions," he says. "We never discuss what we'll do onstage, and we don't do postmortems either. That hasn't changed in 22 years."See the full content of this document
Extract
The Necks
AUSTRALIA DOESN'T come to mind as a hotbed for either jazz or experimental music, yet it has plenty of both. And when either genre is mentioned, a Sydney trio with the non-jazzy, un-experimental name of The Necks rises immediately to th...
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