At the start of "The Sun Never Sets", the last song of the six-piece set Live at the South Bank, drummer Steve Reid sounds tired. He lags slightly behind the flickering electronic phrases of collaborator Kieren Hebden, better known as Four Tet, like he's forgotten the clip of the tune that opened their 2007 album, Tongues. It would be hard to blame Reid, after all; at this point, just 10 months before he died of throat cancer last year, the 65-year-old was an hour deep into a June 2009 performance with Reid and fierce Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. They'd been busy, too. Earlier, the trio had taken four of five numbers well past the 10-minute mark. The only relatively brief piece had been "Lyman Palace", for which Gustafsson finally stepped onto the stage and-- with his deep, broad bellows-- injected a ferocity that bordered on frightening. You'd be tired, too.
But Reid's story has never really been a tale of quitting. A teenager drummer in New York, he famously gigged with James Brown and the Vandellas before serving a two-year prison sentence for his Vietnam evasion. He returned to the kit upon release, eventually forming his own group (with at least one really great album to their name) and working with legends spread across several different forms-- R&B legend Dionne Warwick, astral jazz traveler Sun Ra and African icon, and iconoclast Fela Kuti. In 1986, he even added a touch of percussion to Miles Davis' Tutu. But for a player who was drumming with the stars by the time he was 16, much of the success and steady work that might've seemed logical for Reid mostly proved elusive. Through the 1990s and into the first half of the last decade, his output could be described, at best, as a trickle. But that all changed when, as legend has it, Hebden watched Gustafsson perform at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2004. He decided he needed a drummer and, more importantly, a collaborative partner. After Hebden, Reid's trickle became something of a deluge. The two first played together in 2005, and Hebden played on parts of Reid's fantastic record for Soul Jazz that year, Spirit Walk. They summarily released two albums, The Exchange Sessions Vols. 1 and 2, recorded in a single day at London's Exchange Mastering Studios.
Hebden's albums as Four Tet had often seemed about a sort of robotic composure, pairing an elegant sense of melody to a composer's eye for development; these collaborations with Reid, though, showed a young musician interested in letting loose those fetters, in playing with more interest in the perfect personal musical moment than pristine dance-floor momentum. Reid and Hebden continued to flirt with flashes of brilliance on 2007's Tongues and 2008's NYC, but they never seemed to cash in on their true potential. Sometimes, it seemed, Hebden couldn't push away from his compulsion to build big songs, no matter how hard Reid banged the drums at his back.
On South Bank-- the most vital and essential document of Reid and Hebden's five-year partnership-- it feels clear that, at least onstage, they were finally able to go the distance. The invocation "Morning Prayer" opens slowly, circling in space with a meditative calm. For 17 minutes, the pair traces lines around the other's rhythm, Hebden's electronics and keys shaping a cradle for Reid's busy tom-and-cymbal patter, and vice versa. Back in 2006, on Volume 1, "Morning Prayer" felt slight but suggestive, as if Reid and Hebden were only testing the water; here, they're living in it. In London that night, Gustafsson was so mesmerized by the pair's chemistry that he forgot to join until the piece was done.
When he finally enters, though, he fits readily, adding a strange new mix of aggression and soul to "Lyman Place". He sounds like an air-raid siren but quotes Coltrane; Reid and Hebden respond in kind, their own treatment reinvigorated by a stranger who didn't know its original bounds. "People Be Happy", originally heard on 2007's Tongues, capitalizes on that openness, too, with the trio pushing the tune's distinctive fragment of a melody into a strange, elliptical sphere. Gustafsson and Reid wind strands of sound through one another, while Hebden sits back, building a back-and-forth bed of sound upon which they both move. As accomplished with fierce, focused marches ("Untitled") as they are with open-ended textural explorations ("25th Street"), this one-time-only trio understood its own extremes-- and how to navigate breathlessly, relentlessly, and brazenly between them.
As "The Sun Never Sets" progresses, Reid's fatigue turns out to be only a passing notion. Just three minutes in, he's forcing the rest of the squad to twist one of the most memorable melodies of his work with Hebden into unrecognizable patterns. He jumps from cymbals to kick drum, from toms to cymbals. Gustafsson broods, and Hebden wraps the theme in a fuselage of noise. They distend what seems like the end, stretching the coda into a slow exhalation. But as everyone else starts to fade, Reid remains, pounding his drums a little harder than you might expect after these nearly 90 bustling minutes, like he wants to keep going.
