A Parisian whose gateway to jazz and hip-hop was the Beastie Boys, Lex Blondin opened the Total Refreshment Centre in a London warehouse in 2012, creating a space that tripled as a recording studio, artist workshop, and concert venue. Within a few years, the community orbiting TRC became the epicenter of an adventurous jazz scene that couldn’t be confined to Britain. Soon, such acts as the Comet Is Coming and Moses Boyd established an international reputation, helping to seal Total Refreshment Centre’s position in the musical vanguard.
Just as the popularity of Total Refreshment Centre and its associated artists started to crest, neighborhood noise complaints led the Hackney Council to decline to renew its live music license in 2019. The concert stage shuttered but the recording studio and artistic community remained. Blondin and TRC are currently on a mission to popularize the Total Refreshment Centre brand, launching an eponymous imprint and collaborating with Blue Note on Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre, a seven-track collection featuring musicians associated with TRC. Some of this music was recorded at Total Refreshment Centre, some elsewhere in London or Europe, which means the compilation isn’t so much a chronicle of a scene as a definition of an aesthetic: stylish artifacts repurposed as a vehicle to the future.
In the liner notes, Emma Warren—author of a 2019 book on Total Refreshment Centre called Make Some Space—calls the featured artists “the widescreen young cousins of Guru’s landmark Jazzmatazz,” a reference to the groundbreaking album the rapper released in 1993 after leaving Gang Starr. Guru enlisted such jazz titans as Donald Byrd, Lonnie Liston Smith, and Roy Ayers to record live in the studio, an innovation that yielded livelier results than the British jazz-rap group Us3’s Hand on the Torch, a 1993 record created with free reign to sample from the vast Blue Note catalog. Featuring the U.S. Top 10 hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” Hand on the Torch was part of Blue Note’s modernization mission of the 1990s, a project that also produced the Blue Break Beats series, compilations that plucked highlights from funky soul-jazz LPs of the late ’60s and ’70s—and which stuffy jazz fans dismissed upon release.
Nearly 30 years later, sampled loops and the jazz-rap fusion forged on albums like Jazzmatazz are part of the lingua franca of jazz, something Transmissions from Total Refreshment Centre makes clear. None of its juxtapositions are startling; they feel like the natural evolution of a process set in motion years ago. Each track traces a connection to the crate-digging cross-pollination of the ’90s, ignoring perceived borders between dance, experimental, hip-hop, and pop. The proceedings take on a slight air of nostalgia, not for the initial sources but for their rediscovery, the moment when these disparate strands were first tied together. When Miryam Solomon sings sweetly over Matters Unknown’s refurbished bossa nova beat, it doesn’t bring to mind Latin music LPs from the ’60s—it sounds like peak Stereolab.
Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre is filled with quiet, fleeting moments that vaguely recall something else, particularly if an MC is involved. Soccer96, the duo of Max Hallett and Dan Leavers (who also play in Comet Is Coming), conjure the ghost of Jazzmatazz in a spontaneous collaboration with rapper Kieron Boothe, playing on seedy ’70s funk and hard hip-hop rhythms. Neue Grafik Ensemble—one of the few acts here signed to Total Refreshment Records—team with Brother Portrait on “Black,” a sinewy number that taps into the spookier elements of trip-hop. As trumpeter Byron Wallen intertwines with the sawing drone of Oli Langford’s strings on “Closed Circle,” there are hints of Miles Davis stretching the limits of hard bop just before he delved into fusion on In a Silent Way.
Fusion is at the center of Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre—not as a musical style but an aesthetic. What’s striking about each of the compilation’s featured artists is how thoroughly they integrate adventurous improvisation to the skittish rhythms. Groove and vibe are present but they’re not the key to the music; exploration is. Even the cheerfully insistent “Isa”—the most conventionally danceable cut—is based on a live improvisation, with Noah Slee overdubbing vocals at a later date. “Isa” is a bit of an outlier, though. Most of the transmissions on this compilation are appealingly monochromatic, such as Resavoir’s clustered, clattering reading of Charles Tolliver’s “Plight” and Jake Long’s “Crescent (City Swamp Dub),” where Tamar Osborn’s elongated baritone saxophone runs give shape to slow, churning funk. This is the experimentation fostered at the Total Refreshment Centre, a sensibility that spilled out into the larger jazz world: alternately smooth and restless, nostalgic yet forward-thinking, both natural and alluring.
