ZAUM

'I Hope You Never Love Anything As Much As I Love You'
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"Drummer/composer Steve Harris surfaced in the 1980s with the highly original UK jazz and free-funk band Pinski Zoo, but his ventures with Zaum are much more abstract - Harris himself has said of this album: "The last thing I wanted it to sound like was the perceived notion of jazz, or anything else for that matter." Perceived notions certainly only appear here in fleeting glimpses, and almost always on the way to becoming something else - the jazziest element comes from Geoff Hearn's Coltrane-to-Garbarek sax, which sometimes makes a late entry into abstract collective passages and wrenches both them and Harris's inspired ensemble-rooted drumming into new directions. Pattering brushwork scurries on under long electric viola sounds and doodling clarinet lines; squeezed sounds like reversed tapes, squeezebox effects like abstract folk music, or gothic vocal laments drift over edgy electric guitars or deep, wind-in-chimneys keyboard notes. But for all the absence of easy hooks of any kind, this is very superior non-idiomatic contemporary music that almost never treads water and promises a surprise around every corner."
– JOHN FORDHAM, THE GUARDIAN
"It’s quite simply the best British improvised record in more than a decade..."
– BRIAN MORTON, THE WIRE
“Zaum have been making a name as one of the most original and exciting free-music projects in the world. On the strength of their fourth album, it’s a richly deserved reputation.”
– Jazzwise
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"Zaum have been making a name as one of the most original and exciting free-music projects in the world. On the strength of their fourth album its a richly deserved reputation" Jazzwise, 2007
Zaum is a seven piece ensemble performing improvised music at its very best. Zaum creates an imaginary space in which sound happens - sometimes with delicacy, sometimes with staggering intensity. Steve Harris's Zaum is music instantly concieved and played by great improvisers. Initially put together by Steve Harris in the Autumn of 2002 to record their first album, the group, which was always intended to involve a shifting number of personnel working together in a variety of music settings, has continued to flourish and develop.
The recent edition of The Penguin Guide To Jazz describes Zaum's album Above Our Heads The Sky Splits Open as a masterpiece and awards it their highest accolade. It says of the group: "...the group's music does not follow a hard-line non-idiomatic course, but explores new sonorities within and against a recognisable instrumental discourse".
A Zaum performance is always in flux, always trading warmly "organic" sounds against tonalities that are not so much dissonant or alien as uncanny, in the strict and original sense. It is profoundly humane music that communicates at a very deep level.