Icebreaker Extraction - Btl10188 - Jazz - by Between The Lines

Is it minimal music, trance, pop, contemporary jazz or classical music? Icebreaker blend a number of difficult to categorise musical styles into a gesamtkunstwerk. In their inventive flights of fancy the British band with the exquisite line-up explore areas where most other ensembles fear to tread. This might be because the Icebreaker group, founded by James Poke and John Godfrey in 1989, brought together artists from avant-garde areas in which intellectual definitions of musical positions were obviously meaningless. Two longer compositions - Damian le Gassik’s “Mad Legs In A Sack” and Gordon McPherson’s “The Baby Bear’s Bead”, and “Goldylox”, a remix of the preceding track – provide listeners with a plethora of musical impressions which directly address their imagination. In a continuous creative process, numerous and highly diverse sequences of impressions emerge, some evoking almost naturalistic landscapes, others, in stark contrast, the jungle of a futuristic metropolis. The piano motif which features in the “First Movement“ of “Mad Legs In A Sack” is completed by intriguingly beautiful contributions on flute and saxophone, while the melodic passages in the “Second Movement“, highlight the unity of all twelve musicians in the band playing together. In the “Third Movement“, a modern jazz improvisation of the piano provides one of the many possible outcomes to this acoustic adventure. The ultra-cool rock-guitar riff intro to “The Baby Bear’s Bed” turns into a maelstrom, with the entire band joining in, one after the other, and it surges through an exotic array of musical territories. Such unusual sounds confirm the status of Icebreaker as one of those bands whose extraordinary repertoire will always offer an alternative to the prevailing celebration of elegant boredom.