Strong Language, Lunge (Emanem)

Supermodel, Supermodel, Gail Brand, Tim Perkis,  Gino Robair, John Shiurba and Matthew Sperry (Emanem)

Ballgames and Crazy, Gail Brand and Mordan Guberman (Emanem)

Instinct and the Body, Gail Brand and Mark Sanders (Regardless)

The astonishing London-born (in 1971) trombonist Gail Brand, who recently changed her name to Sarah Brand, grew up in Birmingham where she first began playing the trombone at nine.

She studied music at Middlesex University and played many genres of music from classical to pop, before turning definitively towards free improvisation in 1994.

In December 2000 she recorded the first part of an album called Strong Language with a quartet named Lunge together with three other prominent improvisers — drummer Mark Sanders, Pat Thomas on acoustic piano and electronics, and violinist and electronics man Phil Durrant.

They came together again in June 2002 to record the rest of the album at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam at the dOeK Festival.

In their sleeve notes Lunge declare that they share their “group and individual inheritance of multiple musical styles and influences, ranging from quiet and sparse soundscapes to full-throttle musical onslaughts.”

As the quartet’s sole horn Brand is at the centre of their timbre but not in any dominating mode.

In the album’s opener Planarchy, her muffled quietude sounds as if it is just coming into hearing, at one with the rococo electronics and Sanders’s scuttling percussion.

Her slides take on more volume alongside Thomas’s chiming piano in Rough with the Smooth, but it is still a hushed, breathing trombone, beautiful in its virtual inaudibility.

White Writeable Area has a long solo by a louder Brand. She climbs, snarls, contorts, falls, vibrates and guffaws beside Sanders’s talking drums like a friend sharing confidences in a palaver of musical secrets.

No Filters is closer to a “musical onslaught.”

Thomas pounds his keys, Brand is loud and defiant, with Sanders all over his drums.

Mull it Over from the Bimhuis gives more violin sound to Durrant, who has a long collaquy with a muted Brand.

A musical enigma is the 2002 album Supermodel, Supermodel. Each track is titled after the first name of a prominent catwalker.

Is it a series of laments, praisesongs, protests or elegies? Or all or none of these?  It was recorded in Oakland, California, when Brand was invited there to perform by four local improvisers — guitarist John Shiurba, bassist Matthew Sperry, percussionist Gino Robair and Tim Perkis on electronics.

Brand creates echoes of another iconoclastic London trombonist, Paul Rutherford, on tracks like Naomi Naomi or Stephanie Stephanie.

She wails eerily on Kathy Kathy and on Twiggy Twiggy she plays an extraordinary duet with Perkis’s electronics set.

On the longest track, Iman Iman, Brand plays with what sounds like a fierce indignation beside Robair’s fluttering percussion and Sperry’s bowed bass, the quintet reaching a high level of excitation.

The Supermodel band played a number of live performances in the Bay Area during Brand’s visit, and at one of them the vocalist Morgan Guberman asked her if they could do a live duet. 

So pleased were both of them with the result that they made a complete album in an Oakland studio called Ballgames and Crazy.

Guberman almost makes words with his vocals — you can even hear a US accent in his quasi-verbals just like the more you listen to Brand (as with Rutherford) you can catch a London accent in her timbre.

You read the title of each track, listen to the duo, muse and imagine — who is this Big Man in the Pool, why are they Guarding Golden Gating, what is it like Dating a Raw Oyster?

The album becomes a huge stimulus of the imagination as you listen to Guberman’s ever-new language and Brand’s wondrous, heterogeneous sounds.

Finally, Brand affirms a true empathetic musical partnership with Sanders in the 2009 album Instinct and the Body, dedicated to two marvellous British free jazz souls, Rutherford and the Nottingham-born reedman Elton Dean.

She talks, chunters, blusters, murmurs, wails, snorts and belches through Automatism, with Sanders’s percussion attesting to every sound she makes. 

Tread Softly… exposes the beauty of her tone while in Dean’s Dream she lets loose an astounding trombone soundscape in three-and-a-half minutes of powerful inventive brilliance.

Instinct is a marker in British jazz recordings and as for Brand, Rutherford’s spirit breathes and blows through her slides.