I’d long known about Brighton’s safehouse project, an enduring and admirable enterprise dedicated to improvised music, initially founded in Poole by the late ZAUM drummer Steve Harris. Over the years safehouse has used several venues in Brighton and played host to players like Evan Parker, John Tchicai and Eddie Prevost. But until now I had not been to its location of the past two years or so, at The Rose Hill – a characterful, intimate and friendly watering hole a touch or two off the main road into the city, just south-east of the London Road traffic lights at Preston Circus.
Entering The Rose Hill took me back to the good old days when I first explored the “brown bars” of mid-1970s Amsterdam, with the advantage that the Rose has both a small but serviceable stage and a good acoustic. Unfortunately, I got there too late to hear much of the opening set from the fine trio of saxophonist Ron Caines (of early, experimental prog-rock fame with East of Eden and today a collaborator with, a.o., that indefatigable improviser Martin Archer); double-bassist Gus Garside (a key founding figure of the safehouse project at Brighton and, like Caines, at times a collaborator with Archer) and James Parsons (d). But what I did hear impressed me, especially some meditative and exquisitely cast pianissimo passages in the trio’s penultimate piece.
And then, after a short interval, came the event that had induced me to make the 70-mile round trip from Chichester. The 40-minute session of two freely improvised pieces from the trio of Hearn, Brice and Wells was simply “out of this world”, riveting from start to finish. Recently, Hearn and Brice have played together a fair few times and Hearn remembers playing many years ago in a jam session with Wells and, among others, Bobby Wellins. But Brice and Wells had never played together. “Any idea what sort of areas we’ll be dealing with?” asked Wells just before the trio took to the stage. “Not really,” volunteered Brice. “Let’s just play!”
And so they did, delivering the best set of free improvisation I’ve heard. Substantiation of that judgement starts with a touch of history, back in 1968 when a 22-year-old Spike Wells was taken on board by the legendary Tubby Hayes.
When asked some time ago why he thought Hayes had hired him after hearing him play on just one “test” number Spike replied “It was an intuitive thing, a bit like people say about Miles Davis. He hired you because he heard something about your playing that he wanted, and as long as you provided it, he let you do what you wanted… There were new freedoms opened up in the concept of how to play together rather than just accompanying. We were all spinning ideas off each other in a rather more democratic way and that was what Tubby liked to get into at that point. I think he was intent on freeing up the overall concept.”
Here’s the the initial key as to why this Rose Hill gig was as satisfying as it was inspiring. From the late 1960s on, the idea of “freeing up the overall concept” in the burgeoning circles of free or purely improvised music has sometimes led to the sort of faintly absurd situations explored in Ian Carr’s 1973 Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz In Britain and Eberhard Weber’s recent autobiography A German Jazz Story, reviewed in JJ in 2021. Weber remembers, for example, a Baden-Baden Free Jazz meeting of the late 1960s, supervised by writer and producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, which led to a recording session. Weber and pianist Wolfgang Dauner kicked off with a freely improvised piece; after a while, Dauner introduced a few chords in complementary contrast. Immediately, the red light in the studio went off as Berendt reminded the musicians that this was a free-jazz date – and so harmonies were prohibited. “So Dauner played with his elbows and I responded in like manner!” as Weber once drily recalled to me.
While the absence of a piano freed the Hearn / Brice / Wells trio from any such possible ”constraints”, a healing shape-shifting idea of harmony inflected their totally improvised set. A free-flowing yet astutely disciplined give and take of phrase and dynamics made for the sort of overall plasticity of expression which evinced how much the faculty of empathetic listening was as important to the musicians as their diversely projected playing. While this was often high octane stuff, none of the participants overplayed or strove to take centre stage, and a nuanced melodic sensibility was often in evidence, especially from Brice.
A superb bassist, Brice has impeccable intonation, a great, deep sound and a real feeling for improvised form: hear his critically acclaimed Fire Hills album, which features him in both trio and octet settings. At the Rose Hill he offered some tasty arco touches but chiefly played pizzicato, at times moving from moments of practically pointillist subtlety into deliciously propulsive passages of classic, triplet-sprung and finger-clicking swing.
Throughout, he and Wells were deep in the ever-changing pocket, with Wells showing – whether on sticks, brushes or mallets – why it is that so many (including me) consider him the finest British drummer ever to sit at the tubs. Check out his website, discover that Lester Young remains this most literate and intelligent drummer’s “favourite jazz musician of all time”, and dive into what Spike calls his “musical den”. Here you can enjoy nearly 60 items from his privately recorded archives, which feature him in the company of modern greats such as Dexter Gordon, Joe Harriott, Stan Getz, Tubby Hayes and Arild Andersen and – of course – his longtime soul mate, Bobby Wellins.
On tenor throughout, Hearn (a co-founder of safehouse) sustained a wondrous quality of resonant tone and potent phrase, whether sculpting patient ascending lines culminating in beautifully controlled split harmonics, or digging into some ferocious yet once again disciplined baying. At times a modern blues feeling (if not form) could be sensed and it seemed only fitting when, to the ultra-attentive audience’s evident delight, Hearn touched briefly on Rollins’s irresistible Alfie’s Theme from 1966.
Some may have sensed here something of the spirit of Charles Gayle, David S. Ware or Sam Rivers – all important players for Hearn, but no more so than, say, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders. But what I heard and relished was the soulful, affirmative and ever-questing spirit of Geoff Hearn himself, in exceptional creative dialogue with his remarkable colleagues in musical democracy, Olie Brice and Spike Wells.
“When’s the next one?” asked a happy Wells after the gig. Sooner than soon, I hope!
Geoff Hearn, Olie Brice and Spike Wells, at safehouse, Brighton, 5 June 2025
