Alabaster DePlume talks to Jude Rogers ahead of boundary-blurring performance at Llandaff Cathedral
Tuesday 1 October 2024
“I can’t wait. We’ll have a special moment together, one that won’t ever happen again.” – Alabaster DePlume
In the beautiful, contemplative space of Llandaff Cathedral this Wednesday, Alabaster DePlume will be playing a live show for the Cardiff Music City Festival, the month-long city celebration of musical innovation in performance and technology. DePlume’s boundary-blurring work is perfect for the festival’s ambitions, mixing soft strands of jazz, spoken word, politics, global folk, minimalism and energetic improvisation. Then there’s the experiences of the shows themselves. US website Pitchfork called them “halfway between motivational sermon and spiritual reverie”.
“I don’t know what I do,” DePlume says, very warmly, when he’s asked to describe his music to a complete newcomer. “What I do – that’s down to them,” he then adds obliquely, before explaining that this “them” refers to the readers reading this piece, and the audience members who come to his performances – any people wanting to come along and spend some time in the same room. “They come [to my shows] with big things to say and big things to feel, and more and more, I am enjoying the fact that anything happens,” he adds, a little impishly. “Whatever happens at my shows isn’t because I’ve come to ‘do’ something to the people…what happens is not about me. It’s what would’ve happened anyway. What will happen will just come through me.”
Born Angus Fairbairn in Manchester in 1981, the second oldest of four children to teacher parents, he gained his stage name in the early 2000s, after someone shouted at him through the window of a passing car – the rude tirade included a phrase that sounded like Alabaster DePlume. He learned the saxophone soon after, playing music around working with adults with learning disabilities, and released a few albums: 2012’s poetry-filled debut, Copernicus: The Good Book Of No, his narratives the peculiar, compelling work of a 21st century Ivor Cutler, and 2013’s The Jester with pianist Daniel Inzani.
He then moved to London in 2015, where he found work as a teaching assistant, and set up a night called Peach in a beloved East London creative hub and studio space, the Total Refreshment Centre, which found fans within London’s blossoming new jazz scene. He released a 14-track album of the same name in the same year, and ever since, DePlume’s output has been prolific and wildly exploratory.
On record, his collaborators include Tom Skinner, drummer in Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s Radiohead side-project The Smile, folksinger Riognach Connolly of Radio 2 Folk Award-winners The Breath, acclaimed singer-songwriter Rozi Plain, and Daniel Leavers aka Danalogue, synthesiser player and composer with Shabaka Hutchings’ jazz trio The Comet Is Coming. Just before the pandemic, he released an album of instrumentals dedicated to two men with learning difficulties who he worked with for 10 years, 2020’s Cy and Lee, full of music they made together “to help each other be calm” – a boon in dark times. His latest single, December 2023’s Gifts Of Olive, references the Palestinian poet and English literature professor Refaat Alareer, killed in the Gaza Strip the same month; the current situation in the Middle East is never far from his work. “I enjoy improvised music, but no music is ever going to be as wonderful as people,” Deplume explains.
His personality on Zoom is the same as it is in concert: earnest, meditative, intense, but deeply felt. Onstage, he has a “menu” of things they might play, literally a huge pile of paper, from which any player can choose anything at any point, and then improvise accordingly. “Imagine you’re at the restaurant and you look, and think, oh, I would like some of this. But can you do it
with a bit of that, and some of that, this other thing on the side? And later you look at your menu again, and decide to have a glass of this…” He smiles. “It’s like that!”
In Llandaff, he’ll be joined by “amazing” bassist and composer Daisy George and singer/drummer Momoko Gill. George doesn’t know them brilliantly, but this doesn’t matter, he says: “She must bring herself to the tunes, and she does bring herself”. Gill was on his recent album, 2023’s Come With Fierce Grace, on the mesmerisingly tender track Did You Know? “Momoko’s capacity is rare among drummers – where often drummers can be perhaps flashy or feel responsible to lead, Momoko closes her eyes and is emotionally engaged with the music.” This deep immersion in the possibilities of music is clearly everything to him.
Wednesday’s show will be about the enjoyment of music’s possibilities in the moment, in the air, in the startling space of the cathedral. DePlume asks me if I’d like to play or add something to the mix myself on the night – I tell him to enjoy the beauty of the local area, and the incredible building, before the show if he can. “Thank you for telling me that,” he says, adding that he’s had beautiful times in the past writing and recording in Wales.
He loves giving himself up to people in a place and forgetting about ego. “If I started thinking, I had better do a good show, so that people like me and think that my music is good… I mean, who really cares?” He smiles. “The great thing about these humans that I will see on Wednesday is that they’re amazing and I love them already. I can’t wait. We’ll have a special moment together, one that won’t ever happen again.”
Alabaster DePlume plays at Llandaff Cathedral this Wednesday 2 October.
