Album: Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

The Exchange Session Vol 1, DOMINO

On Four Tet's Everything Ecstatic from last year, Kieran Hebden busied himself too intensely with a drum machine, burying everything under a laborious clutter of beats that were both rigid and desultory. Thanks, then, to Antoine from the shop Paris Jazz Corner for putting Hebden in touch with Steve Reid, who as a teenager drummed on "Dancing In The Street", and who went on to play with the likes of Sun Ra and Miles Davis. Reid's sophisticated sense of rhythm brings new depth and texture to Hebden's music, with his sprinklings of small percussion and fiery bursts of trap drums on "Soul Oscillations" recalling the early Seventies work of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, while Hebden's organ drones, flute and sax samples, kalimba-tone keyboards and sharp incursions of electronic noise evoke Sun Ra's out-there style. It all comes to a head on the 16 minutes of "Electricity And Drum Will Change Your Mind", where deranged sax and keyboards soar and dive in the turmoil established by Reid's flurries of drums. It's jazz, Jim, but not as Jamie Cullum knows it.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Electricity And Drum Will Change Your Mind'