IT'S hard to know why the musicians who make up new band The Weave aren't mega by now. Maybe it's a provincial thing.
But all that could be about to change. For here we have the first jazz outfit from Liverpool which is attempting to put itself on the national stage playing original music.
Led by the genial and super talented Martin Smith, The Weave's collective threads can be traced through innumerable hook-ups with The Coral, Shack, Space, The Lightning Seeds, Edgar Jones, Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, John Smith and more.
Mix all those influences up with Miles Davies, Digby Fairweather, Thelonious Monk, John Martyn, Arthur Brown and Albert Lee, and it might be that, finally, there is little to stop them going all the way.
The WeaveSmith first entertained Liverpool audiences as part of student band The Vernons 25 years ago (now there's a comeback many would like to see - not least them, Liverpool Confidential learns), Down the decades since he has been instrumental, as it were, in a small but vibrant jazz community in Liverpool. Not to mention his lifetime role in The Wizards of Twiddly.
Now Smith has collected some of its brightest and best known lights “in the musical city to end all musical cities”: Guitar virtuoso Tony Ormesher, who, at the age of 12, won the Daily Telegraph Young Jazz Musician of the Year award, double bassist Hugo Harrison, ex Muffin-Man Tilo Pirnbaum on drums, jazz pianist Rob Stringer and the peerless ex-Supercharge and Wilsation Tony Peers on trumpet and flugel horn.
Earlier this month, The Weave launched their eponymous debut album with a gig in Parr Street's Studio 2.
Older jazz purists and younger hipsters reverentially watched through real glasses, mock nerd and Cosmo Smallpiece ones as a trio of be-stockinged dancing women helped it all along.
But were they aware that the band were performing for the very first time in public without sheet music? For such is the complexity of Smith's sublime scoring and arrangements which make it all look terribly easy as he leads the band on a Sketches of Spain-meets-Forever-Changes odyssey of sound.
None of it is completely serious, but it is all, well, rather cool.
*Martin Smith's The Weave open Liverpool's first International Jazz Festival, this Thursday evening (February 28) at 10pm. Capstone Theatre, Hope University, 17 Shaw Street, Liverpool L6 1HP. Tel: 0151 291 3578. Free admission.
