Have a look at what Jerry Dammers looks like now. A Google image search perhaps. He looks like a total geezer. Anyway, you know the drill – awesomely good songwriter in The Specials, political activist, pioneering dental practitioner – but I like to think of him as someone who overturns the idea of diminishing returns, and who’s getting stronger and more experimental as he gets older. If you’ve got a fire you can keep it going, and in this case assemble a many-piece orchestra and dress them in Sphinx heads and pharaoh costumes. Put a house on it, this will be stellar.
Songwriter/keyboardist Jerry Dammers - founder of The Specials and the 2-Tone record label – and his 18 piece orchestra pay tribute to the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, mingling their sounds with those of dub innovator Coxone Dodd, exotica pioneer Martin Denny and more.
Costumes, theatrics and visuals mix with ska, reggae, hip-hop, dub-step, rock and outer-spatial sounds – an unforgettable ride across the galaxies with a crew of leading jazz soloists – Larry Stabbins, Denys Baptiste, Finn Peters, Nathaniel Facey, Jason Yarde and Zoe Rahman amongst them – and the voices of Francine Luce, rap poet Anthony Joseph and dub poet Space Ape.
