British free improvisers = double bass player Olie Brice, tenor sax player Rachel Musson and drummer Mark Sanders have been playing together for years in various formats and bands, but Immense Blue is the debut album as a trio. The album was recorded live at Vortex in London in October 2022 and was released on Brice’s label, West Hill Records.

The musical ties between these close comrades are numerous. Musson and Brice recorded as a duo (Tapering Arms Point Into The Wind, Weekertoft, 2018), and she plays in Brice’s Octet (Fire Hills, West Hill, 2022). Brice and Sanders played together in the bands of Tobias Delius, Paul Dunmall, Luís Vicente, Mikołaj Trzaska and Ken Vandermark. Sandsers and Musson play together with Pat Thomas in Shifa and with Lian Noble. These gifted improvisers are well-versed in all aspects of the art of the moment, including inventive and imaginative exploration of sound and timbre, ecstatic and intense dynamics, energetic and even swinging rhythmic drive and thoughtful and more introspective melodic counterpoints. This joyful performance is an excellent testimony to Brice, Musson and Sanders’ resourceful, improvisation skills, with only brief solo parts, but with deep listening, poetic and conversational, and almost telepathic interplay of this trio. It is a performance you wish that you could experience live and close.

The album title and the titles of the three pieces are borrowed from American poet Fred Moten’s ‘collection of poetry B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010), named after the poet’s mother.

Eyal Hareuvveni

Olie Brice (double bass), Rachel Musson (tenor saxophone), Mark Sanders (drums)