Kansas Smitty's - Things Happened Here

The Guardian 80

(Ever)
The east London bar-band’s knowing patchwork of jazz styles is ambitious and fun

Kansas Smitty’s is a live-music bar in Hackney, east London. It’s also the name of the seven-piece band that runs the place and calls it home, a band that doesn’t sound remotely like any of its contemporaries. It plays a knowing, at times slightly wry, patchwork of jazz styles from the past, filtered through 21st-century ears and sensibility. Neither pastiche nor parody, it’s refreshing and often (dare I say it?) fun. This is the band’s third and most ambitious album so far. The various parts of the patchwork are so well integrated by now that their origins are often just dim, fleeting echoes. It’s the textures, the harmonies, the sudden vivid flash of a clarinet, that mark it out. Outstanding among these nine tracks, all compositions by the leader, saxophonist and clarinettist Giacomo Smith, are the brooding, vaguely Ellingtonian opening number, Riders, and the irresistibly groovy Sunnyland. This, featuring some great drumming by Will Cleasby, is dedicated to the late blues pianist Sunnyland Slim, but manages to introduce a hint of the Caribbean as well. That’s one of the delights of Kansas Smitty’s; you never know what’s coming next.