Group Listening, a collaboration between Stephen Black, aka Sweet Baboo, and experimental jazz musician Paul Jones, comes to Servant Jazz Quarters for a very special intimate show.

Like Virginia Astley or Simon Jeffes, Group Listening tread the overlap between classical and experimental music. Their first album, Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol.1, was a haunting, reflective and lovingly considered selection box of musical reworkings, reimagining tracks by the likes of Arthur Russell, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt. In making their own record of reimagined musical works, the two musicians were doing what all music fans do: comparing favourite tracks, turning each piece over for new meaning and developing a musical understanding of each other in the process.

Fast forward a couple of years, and with a remix album of Vol.1, a 12” featuring a reworked version of the Fatima Yamaha club staple What’s A Girl To Do?, a radically recomposed remix for Lambchop and an EP of re-arranged works from Cate Le Bon’s LP, Reward under their belt, the duo started Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol.2 from an altogether different vantage point. 

While their first record was put together over an intense three-day period in a studio, Vol. 2 saw the pair take over Jones’ living room and gradually put its ten tracks together between September last year until March of this. As a result, the overall tone is thought-provoking and engagingly unique, retaining an air of abstraction that permits the mind to wander, wonder and dream. The pieces are presented as points of stimulus, ports from which to embark on a journey towards other musical landscapes