ROCK’N’ROLLCONFIDENTIAL
Alabaster DePlume
The sax improv trickster talks the relentless heart, the creative moment and learning to fall.
Blade
runner: Alabaster DePlume prepares to get over himself.
RAISED IN Manchester and based in London, the man born Angus Fairbairn taught himself sax in 2007 and embarked upon his singular recording odyssey in 2012, making waves in reality on the capital’s improv scene with wide-eyed spoken word and fluttering horn murmurations. Like his other albums, Alabaster DePlume’s latestA Blade Because A Blade Is Whole takes the listener into meditational, emancipatory non-places where avant-jazz and Zen one-ness converge. A cosmic, warm presence, he’s also busy in the world, with trips to the dentist and the US embassy to attend to. But the man whose latest PR release calls a “poet philosopher of life and death” still has time to ask your interviewer, “how is your heart?”