I Hold the Lion’s Paw’s third studio album Potentially Interesting Jazz Music poses the rhetorical question: what is jazz, or, more pointedly, what might it be? By turn exploratory, playful, and experimental, it is a record that mashes slow-burn trumpet, bass grooves, synths, voice, spoken word, percussion, without ever losing its way or overplaying its hand. From ‘Mechanical Ghosts’, fashioned from electronics, beats, and eerie trumpet, through to ‘When the Earth and Sky Conspired’, underscored by Emily Bennett’s soaring vocal arrangements, Potentially Interesting Jazz Music represents the futuristic sounds of an improvising ensemble dedicated to continuous re-invention and renewal.  

When the Earth and Sky Conspired

Big Bois

Thank You

Prime Time

Level Check// Voodoo

Mechanical Ghosts

Progressive Opposition

Leave

Potentially Interesting Jazz Music

Emily Bennett (Great Rack & an Empty Club Reverb)
Reuben Lewis (I Hold the Lion's Paw)

IHTGR Rezza #14

“In a sea of pedestrians, Reuben stands out as an intrepid explorer.” – Julien Wilson

Reuben Lewis’s practice is both singular and eclectic. As an active performer, composer and bandleader, he has refined a unique electro-acoustic language, devised through trumpet with extended techniques and preparations alongside live analogue processing with pedals and amplifiers, that is as much at home in a beer-stained nightclub or contemporary theatre space as it is on a hilltop in Malaysia surrounded by dancers and bull-trance shamans. Reuben considers improvisation to be at the core of his artistic practice, both as a vehicle for meaningful collaboration that transcends stylistic or disciplinary boundaries as well as a fundamental philosophy behind making new work.

His latest album of composed work, titled ‘Abstract Playgrounds’, was released in 2018 through the Australian independent label, Earshift Music. The album features his psychedelic jazz collective I Hold the Lion’s Paw and has been described by Andy Hamilton in The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music as “a beguiling stew of afro-beat, jazz-rock-inflected postbop, and electro-acoustic noise – and on a deeper level, one of the richest, most insightful examinations of Miles Davis’s early 1970s work that I know.”

Reuben was nominated for a Freedman Jazz Fellowship in 2018 and 2019 and was a participant in The Australian Art Orchestra’s Creative Music Intensive in both 2015, 2016 and 2019 as well as the inaugural MAP Delhi residency in 2015 with the Tony Yap Dance Company. Over the course of 2019/2020, Reuben has been appointed to the role of Associate Artist, as part of the Australian Art Orchestra’s Pathfinders – Music Leadership Program.

IHTLP

Popular tracks