GET THE BLESSING play Nathan Phillips Square Saturday (June 23), 5 pm, as part of the Toronto Jazz Festival. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Get the Blessing, a Bristol jazz band featuring the rhythm section of Portishead, sound very much like what that suggests: lots of laid-back grooves influenced by Afrobeat, hip-hop, dub reggae, post-rock and contemporary left-field dance music, with a vaguely punk grit to the mood. It’s essentially a type of funky jazz, but stripped of all the tacky fusion clichés. You won’t hear much slap bass. Instead, you get cascades of echoes and wobbly tremolo guitar lines.
As much as the band is anchored by the drums and bass, the musicians initially bonded over their love of Ornette Coleman, and the boundary-pushing saxophone legend’s influence is obvious in the mournful horn arrangements and overall willingness to allow for dissonance and experimentation within soulful, emotional music.
The jazz establishment probably finds their chord progressions too harmonically simple and their tones too close to rock music for comfort. Regardless, crossover acts like this are vitally important if the genre is to continue to grow and be seen as more than a historic relic.
Top track: Americano Meccano
