Angus Fairbairn used to carry knives. He didn’t mind if he scared people. But that was several identities ago; anyone who meets the Mancunian poet, saxophonist, and band leader today would be shocked by the revelation. Under his nom de scène, Alabaster DePlume, he disarms with his earnestness, his gentleness, his vulnerability. “Every time I say ‘I,’ it means something different. Because I grow,” he says. “People don’t last. We don’t want them to last. We want them to grow.” To remind himself of this, DePlume memorializes his past selves with the six small tattoos of stick men that feature on the cover of his new album. Now, he’s more likely to wield metaphors than knives, as in its title: A Blade Because a Blade Is Whole.
Blades are symbols of forgiveness for DePlume, less about sharp edges than integrity and strength. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in his recent poetry book, Looking for my value: prologue to a blade. “Healing is the forming of a whole.” These thoughts arose in the wake of his gorgeous 2022 album, GOLD, on which he encouraged his audience to “go forward in the courage of your love” and be “brazen like a baby.” A Blade is that record’s de facto sequel, a quiet moment of reflection after a bold call to action. It’s more restrained but just as urgent: a pen scratching out a manifesto rather than a rallying cry through a megaphone.
DePlume has become a mainstay at London jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre over the past decade, flourishing in its communal atmosphere. Whereas GOLD harnessed this energy through spontaneous sessions with unrehearsed musicians, A Blade is carefully composed and arranged. That doesn’t mean the record is any less collaborative; string and vocal arrangements by Macie Stewart, Donna Thompson, and Momoko Gill are crucial to its easy grandeur. On opener “Oh My Actual Days,” saxophone, piano, and violin limn an extravagant but soothing world—a palace in which you can kick off your shoes. At the song’s climax, DePlume traces out figures with his sax, rising higher and higher but never straining, backed by crashing cymbals and dizzying strings. The main melody returns with a single voice that guides the band through a careful diminuendo, a perfect introduction to DePlume’s message: These are our days on Earth, our actual days, limited in number and every one precious. Remember to savor their magnificence and to navigate them with care.
A Blade is about responsibility to oneself and to others, and the ways in which those responsibilities overlap. To heal others, you must heal yourself, and to heal yourself, you must confront discomfort. On “Thank You My Pain,” DePlume invites his pain in, sits down with it, proffers his gratitude. “Thank you, my pain/For coming again/When so often I turn away,” he sings over a fluttering saxophone and grooving rhythm section, stretching out his syllables with the tender emphasis of a reunited lover regretting his absence. “A Paper Man” recognizes the potential for avoidance and finger-pointing. “A paper man/Lighting candles/Doing things/He can’t handle,” he growls while his sax curls and drifts like wisps of smoke. “Do the flames blame the paper?” Still, DePlume’s anger at his self-destructive interlocutor dissipates over the course of the song until he ends with a sweet invitation to reunite: “Let’s try, while we still can/Let’s just try/Would you be up for that?”
Four instrumentals run consecutively through the second half of A Blade, as if DePlume must reach beyond poetry to elaborate on his ideas. These songs act as a guided meditation on healing, and DePlume can express more with his saxophone than a guru with a well-thumbed thesaurus. A title like “Who Are You Telling, Gus” is sufficient to telegraph the theme of self-doubt; the track’s quavering melody, building from quiet hum to triumphant roar, conveys all the drama of the inner search for assurance. At the song’s end, Thompson’s rolling drums and Ruth Goller’s steady bass drop out and only DePlume’s sax is left, whispering his hard-won secret in your ear.
Spirituality infuses DePlume’s music, making many songs more like wordless hymns than jazz tunes. “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity” does have lyrics, technically, but they float so effortlessly amid an ether of sax and violin that DePlume considers the song an instrumental as well. You might guess what he’s singing based solely on the celebratory verve of his sax lines, lifted from below by ascending piano and from above by soaring violin, a melody that works like a mantra. It’s a rare gift to make an instrument speak, rarer to make it communicate such a vital truth: Dignity doesn’t have to be sought after or even prayed for; it is always there, intrinsic in each person.
When DePlume’s voice returns on “Too True,” it is as hesitant as a false dawn, reluctant to break the spell that he and his band have just cast. The song is about loss—the loss of a loved one, and the loss of the self that could only exist in relation to them. DePlume barely mutters its words, barely plucks its notes on an acoustic guitar. It is perhaps DePlume at his most vulnerable, but he radiates strength in the afterglow of the album’s triumphant run of instrumentals—having done the work, he can face his pain, settle into it without fear.
A Blade ends with a declaration of worth. “That was not a car park/That was my garden,” DePlume sings. “That was not recycling/That was my garden.” It’s a grievance aimed as much at himself as at those who disturbed the beauty of his flowers; after all, it was his job to protect what was important to him, to measure out its boundaries and defend its value. Implicit in these lines is a promise to face grief, to move through it and to become whole again, like a blade—not because it cuts, but because it glints like hope in the dark.
