Jazz
Full Beam Music / ECN Music · 9 October 2026
“Trent Fields” opens at five minutes forty-one and the first bars belong to Simon Paterson’s bass, alone, before Tony Kofi comes in with a tenor solo that grows by accumulation rather than assault. That’s how the whole of “Step Up! Get Down!” is built: four musicians who know each other from playing together every week and are in no hurry whatsoever. Eleven tracks, sixty-nine minutes and forty-five seconds, out 9 October on Full Beam Music and ECN Music. The group began as the house trio at Peggy’s Skylight in Nottingham — Paterson on bass, Paul Deats on Rhodes and Andrew “Woody” Wood on drums — and Kofi stayed on after a gig in 2020.
The centre of gravity is the Rhodes. Deats holds the harmony in that electric tone that has meant Herbie Hancock for half a century, and on “Snake Oil” (five four) he adds a Moog that puts the track closer to seventies funk than to anything being played in a jazz club today. The title track runs six eleven here; the single that came out on its own on 7 August ran four six, and those two minutes are exactly where the band stretches and lets itself play. “Portman Pie” (seven thirty-six) is the freest of the eleven and drifts into atmospheric ground with more John Martyn in it than hard bop.
Seventy minutes is a lot of minutes for this music. Nine of the eleven tracks pass five minutes and two go over eight (“Sola Mento”, eight two, and “Dream Capture”, eight twenty-four), and there isn’t a single short piece to break the stride. The format doesn’t move either: tenor, Rhodes, bass and drums from start to finish, with no change of instrumentation in an hour and ten. Heard end to end in one go, the stretch from “Sweet Bitter Crush” (five thirty-five) to “Crystallise” (six twenty-eight) asks for a cut that never comes.
Making up for it are the craft and one specific production decision: every instrument has air around it and none swallows the others, so that on “Hook Up” (four twenty-six) and “Lucidity” (six thirty) you can follow Wood’s drumming bar by bar without losing what Kofi is doing above it. The band’s name was chosen as the opposite of smooth music, which is perhaps overstating things: this record is groovy and warm before it’s angular.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents