Recording of the Week, Mark Lockheart, 'Dreamers'

The title of Mark Lockheart’s new album on Edition Records, Dreamers, neatly captures the mood of this surrealistic collection, and it would seem the group have clearly been eating way too much cheese before bed. We listen to lots of new ‘jazz’ releases each week here, a good chunk of which can feel somewhat ‘off the peg’, slotting a bit too neatly into one of the many available templates, so it’s refreshing to find something genuinely different, whilst being eminently listenable and tuneful. Lockheart has many decades of form when it comes to creating cutting-edge new music, both as a solo artist, and as a member of two key British jazz groups - Loose Tubes in the 1980s, and Polar Bear in 2000s - but Dreamers feels like an exciting new chapter. It helps that he’s surrounded himself with a superb group - reuniting with Polar Bear bandmate Tom Herbert on electric bass, drummer Dave Smith, who featured on 2009’s In Deep, as well as label-mate Elliot Galvin, whose array of synths really characterise the sound of the record. Lockheart has acknowledged the role that the band played; “The grooves, the sonics and the musical character of each piece are all hugely important. The process of writing music for these musicians led me into a new sound world that’s very different from anything I’d done before”.

Left to right: David Smith, Tom Herbert, Mark Lockheart & Elliot Galvin (Photo by Dave Stapleton)

Straight from the opening soft synth chords of the title track we sense the musicians have an ear on some of the more experimental indie rock of the past decades (Lockheart has form in this area, having contributed to Radiohead’s game-changing Kid A back in 2000). Galvin’s electronics in particular lend a certain sci-fi sheen to proceedings, and the overall mood is invitingly warm and woozy; for all of the experimentation (of which there’s plenty), the tracks feel organic, not abstract. Lockheart’s sax is playful throughout, whether he’s being sentimental or abrasive, often with that sense of irony that was so characteristic of the Loose Tubes sound. There’s no sense that this is purely a star vehicle either, and he frequently steps back, adding discrete textures that support Galvin’s lines, as on ‘Dream Weaver’. He’s noted the influence of such disparate figures as John Zorn, Burt Bacharach, Ellington, and Kraftwerk on this project (although I actually get more of a Vangelis circa 'Blade Runner' vibe here than that of the Man-Machines), and the Zorn parallels are especially evident in comparison to some of the New Yorker’s Film Music collections, albeit shot through with a British sense of eccentricity.

A key element throughout is the way that Galvin’s keyboards mesh with Herbert’s electric bass, the pair frequently playing almost in unison to create amorphous globules of sound that push and pull around Smith’s ever changing rhythms, an effect akin to staring at a lava lamp. After the melancholy of the first few tracks Lockheart throws in some quirky up-tempo curveballs with tracks like ‘Gangster Rat’ and ‘Fluorescences’ (which opens with Galvin approximating an 8-bit arcade game soundtrack), both driven by some nicely abrasive keys and propulsive beats, and the spectre of Weather Report is conjured up on ‘Nature V Nurture’, with Lockheart and Galvin giving their best Shorter and Zawinul impressions. The variety on offer across the 12 tracks, none of which exceed 7 minutes, makes Dreamers an extremely moreish long player, and an early highlight for 2022.