LEDLEY – LEDLEY

Chris Williams and Raph Clarkson, pronounced members of the United Kingdom’s thriving jazz scene, are Tottenham Hotspur season ticket holders who sit next to one another in the stands. Close friends who have previously collaborated as part of Led Bib, the WorldService Project and Paulo Dias Duarte’s Overground Collective, their first album as a duo – with a helping hand from Riaan Vosloo – is framed as an homage to the former Spurs centre-half Ledley King, loosely in the vein of the seventies hit ‘Nice One Cyril’ by Cockerel Chorus, the Scottish band Mogwai’s brooding score to the documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait or the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble’s slowed-down evocations of the tennis player Tim Henman’s nimble footwork and handy serve.

The Led Bib and Let Spin alto saxophonist Chris Williams most recently contributed to the sixteenth volume of John Zorn’s star-studded 300-tune project Bagatelles under the conductor Sam Eastmond, while after departing the WorldService Project the trumpeter Raph Clarkson continues to head up his Dissolute Society and the continent-spanning collective Equal Spirits. He is based in Bristol like the prolific bassist and arranger Riaan Vosloo, who adds bristling electronics to Ledley and is a founding member of Nostalgia 77 as well as a co-founder of Impossible Ark Records on which this album appears.

Naming both their duo and their debut album after the retired footballer and current Tottenham Hotspur ambassador, overall Ledley proves a strangely glacial record which eschews the highs and lows of the average match to instead graph the rumbling of the terraces and map the stadium’s surrounds over a much longer period, a whole career perhaps or the lifelong ritual half succour and half burden of being a fan. It captures the ambiance of a matchday not over the course of ninety minutes but from the moment one pulls on a shirt or jersey and sets out towards the ground, solitary observances and a creeping sense of communality, the air of anticipation which might even manifest as antsiness or anxiety before the game and the settled despondency as one trudges home after a defeat.

In the spring of 2019 the club inaugurated their new ground Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a state of the art facility which boasts a world-first retractable pitch and is the largest club ground in London, though for the sake of sheer novelty and in light of the team’s ongoing lapses it might be best known for its inordinate selection of food and drink.

Instead the album opener ‘Better Than’ seems to capture the rickety sway of the old White Hart Lane through a percussive rattle of wind and brass fingerings plus effects pedals as Williams and Clarkson blow faintly through tube and reed. Amid such muted atmospherics the trumpet fanfare which commences ‘F.O.B.T.W. Pt. 1’ is merely a false start, as the track instead succumbs to a few smeared and spectral wails before ‘Pt. 2’ abounds in trumpet pulses as the saxophone carries a longer melodic arc.

Ledley plays out as two uninterrupted sides of improvisation which are nevertheless demarcated by way of song titles and track lengths. ‘The King’ which effectively serves as the title piece sounds less like an ode or tribute than a dirge for a dead monarch, with a bit of gilded nostalagia even as Vosloo’s furtive electronic tones start to emerge from the depths of the composition.

As we segue into ‘Away Days’, another album standout, the liner notes suggest comparisons with the versatile Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen whose solo works for Rune Grammofon and collaborations with Trygve Seim and Jan Bang or Carmen Villain and Supersilent have tended to harness waves of desolation or eerie fourth world reflection, plus the saxophonist Jan Garbarek whose sustained tones and silences helped to define the ECM sound of the seventies, whether solo or as part of Keith Jarrett’s European quartet. At the same time the swampiness of Ledley’s music and the odd trace of an arabesque call to mind the new Christer Bothén, Mats Gustafsson and Goran Kajfeš project Cosmic Ear which draws upon the music of Don Cherry or the William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake album Heart Trio from last year.

Ledley King sometimes reminded me of Paul McGrath, another centre-back extolled for his composure on the ball and his cool reading of the game whose career was nevertheless decimated by knee injuries. As the Irishman cut a more worn-down figure than King towards the end of his playing career, the comparison has rarely seemed more apt than at the tail-end of ‘Away Days’ when the saxophone melody breaks down and Clarkson delivers a few queasy and world-weary squawks of his trumpet, something which sounds akin to a waddling or bow-legged duck walk.

Elsewhere the sterling ‘Away Days’ summons up a bit of the Mark Knopfler instrumental ‘Going Home’ which served as the theme to the 1983 film Local Hero and still accompanies the walkout of my own club Newcastle United’s players come every home match. That sustained lyricism and Werther’s Original or Hovis nostalgia blurs into more wide-ranging folk themes.

Surveying the environs, on ‘Seven Sisters Road’ those effects pedals and fingerings sound like a spectator humping their way up the stands while ‘Lordship Lane’ seems to conjure the kind of microscopic knee surgery which King endured in the latter part of his career, with a resemblance to the microbeats or staticky glitches of Björk’s intimate and wintry classic Vespertine. Throbbing trumpet characterises ‘The Ambassador’ as we stretch deep into the second side of Ledley, now with Riaan Vosloo’s soupy electronics coming to the fore. ‘One Knee’ staggers towards the brass band tradition before ‘One Club’ closes Ledley in regal fashion yet with a note of menace and defiance, almost an elegy yet with a sublimated sense that there’s more joy and more uproar and no doubt plenty more suffering still to come.