Reviews

From the Double bassist - spring 2007.
David Leahy (db, pf, mbira, bullroarer)

Ex-pat New Zealand bass player David Leahy is now a regular fixture on the UK’s improvised music scene. Finger Painting is his debut solo album, and treats the double bass as the still point of a turning world that incorporates his piano backings and the occasional droll vocal. It’s a good-natured jaunt that demonstrates Leahy’s versatility and the breadth of his stylistic affiliations. He has christened his bass ‘Nigeria’ and in an amusingly penned cartoon, Leahy shows how Nigeria was linked to various gizmos in the recording process including a digital looper, Mbox and Pro Tools. On the first track, Bathtime, the bass becomes reinvented as something approaching a finger-piano and percussion orchestra; I’m not qualified to say exactly what kind of ethnic music Leahy is referencing, but his melodic material has a strong personality and the interaction between parts is effortlessly relaxed and loose. Later bass textures are nudged towards mesmerising looped patterns, as the digital looper picks up one of Leahy’s phrases and does its thing. Looping can be a blunt tool for creative music, but Leahy shows great discernment in the placement and duration of his loops. My Relationship with Driving finds him exploring funky slapped bass figurations that wouldn’t be alien to Milt Hinton; while elsewhere background piano riffs support Leahy’s nimble fingered, melodically percussive bass patterns. Finger Painting is a very enjoyable and conceptually sophisticated Leahy primer.

PHILIP CLARK

From SoundProjector - November 2006

Never one of the most obvious choices of instrument with which to record a solo album, the double bass is nevertheless the cross of choice for New Zealander David Leahy, just one of several Antipodeans resident in the U.K. Although classically trained, Leahy seems to have rapidly assimilated the murky world of Jazz. And if he hasn’t moved beyond that world altogether, he has at least incorporated numerous other elements into his music. This is a self-release, and to be fair, it’s not all subsonic frequencies, Leahy throwing in some impressionistic piano into the mix as well.
If some of the pieces on this CD are a little raucous and loose, something Leahy certainly wouldn’t be ashamed of, it is for the most part a good-natured, almost unusually melodic affair (sad but true in these bleak days of bleepy, electronic minimal everything and people who go out of their way to make their instruments sound like everything except what they are). It’s also true that Leahy is not afraid to disguise the Jazz elements of his playing. He cites amongst his many influences Blue Note maverick Andrew Hill, and much of the work here gives at least a respectful nod to a post-Love Supreme soundscape.
With his taste for unusual dress, seemingly permanently optimistic attitude, and firm belief in the kinaesthetic, Leahy reminds one more than a little of fellow-New Zealander and former U.K. resident, experimental film maker Len Lye. Indeed, apart from being involved with the London Improviser’s Orchestra, Leahy also spends a good deal of time on the city’s contemporary dance scene, both as musician and dancer. If his music lacks the sheer intensity of a fellow board-treader like Cecil Taylor, it does have a lightness of spirit that is rare in the often depressingly post-modern world in which we live.

AARON ROBERTSON