Dog Soup
★★★★
Fragments
DARK CIRCLES. DL/LP
Auspicious first re-release by a new label devoted to jazz talent from the Hastings area.
This impressive debut album by trumpeter Robbie Robson’s short-lived quartet came and went very quickly on its original 2008 CD release, in the midst of what can retrospectively be designated British jazz’s pre-Shabaka quiet time. Seventeen years on, its enduring virtues – the thrilling residual fluidity of Robson’s effects-laden horn, the insidious persuasiveness of John Turville’s ghostly electric piano – should find a much wider audience. The decision (perhaps in part dictated by the timing requirements of vinyl side-breaks) to change the sequencing so the album now begins with its chewy, 20-minute title track brings to the fore intriguing experimental elements which were originally somewhat camouflaged, and the bonus track Hyptonic winningly prefigures the ‘post-rock into jazz’ trajectory which Chicago’s International Anthem label would later inscribe so joyfully.