For their first release, Uroboro play nakedly romantic, passionate music which can also travel strange and disturbing territories. Keith Jafrate's compositions are designed to be completed through improvisation, so in a way they are never finished. But they are far from random, creating focused, narrative music that is lyrical, beautiful and fierce, passing through a range of moods, from balladry to abstraction, via sinuous, funky rhythms and outstanding solo work.
Uroboro is Italian for ouroborous, the symbol of the serpent eating its own tail. It's a symbol of connection, continuity and renewal, processes central to an improvising band, so the name is intended to symbolise how the music happens. Keith's compositions are meditations on belonging, on the green world, and on transcience and flight, many of them inspired by and sourced from the landscape where he lives, in the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire. They call musicians and audience together into a magical space, a field where journey and exploration can take place.
Keith explains the reasoning behind the release of 16 tracks, in this extract from his sleeve notes: "After enforcing a venue change, circumstances had stuck around, and denied us the sound of John Pope for our first gig, so we got the sound of Andy Champion. The family extended. That's why we've released so many tracks: it felt right to chronicle our rapid evolution as fully as possible, to represent what felt like, to me at least, 2 different bands. The two sets of music that appear on the CDs show how much our sound changed, by travelling less than 2 miles after only 21 days and changing 1 musician. It's proof of the force of character, in their totally different ways, of our 2 splendid bassists, that their playing creates such contrast between the 2 sessions."
Andy Champion: bass
Laura Cole: piano & keyboard
Anton Hunter: guitar & electronics
Johnny Hunter: drums
Keith Jafrate: saxophones & spoken word
John Pope: bass & electronics
