Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society and Scruffy Soul Recordings.

‘Music is a type of yearning….music is a type of dreaming…’sings Vula Malinga on Music Is Healing and straight away you’re in: locked into the sound of five super-talented musicians in a room together, making music that’s cut directly onto a lathe. All live, all good: creation rebels forging something magical in the sacred furnace of the groove.

No pressure then , but no problem with players like this: keyboardist Charlie Stacey’s flying fingers have graced the stage with Moses Boyd, Ezra Collective, Yussef Dayes – he has the chops to get the props and then some. Backed up by Tom Driessler‘s boogie-down bass, Jay Phelps‘s sinuous trumpet, Mamour Seck‘s percussion and Oscar Ogden on the drums alongside Vula’s wonderful tones, it’s a veritable cauldron of inventiveness, musicality, and knowledge – and, crucially, fun.

These cats are laying it out and enjoying it immensely: you can’t help but smile at the sheer virtuosity of Charlie’s Tune, for example: rippling piano runs leap into Vula and Jay doubling up on the riffs – it’s wild, and free, and exhilarating. This is the sound of youthful endeavour, of hours and hours and hours of practice distilled into a white heat of musical explosion. Shockingly good.

Vula lets rip with some classic scatting on the cosmically-inclined Rivers of Gondor: Stacey’s synth work echoing Herbie maybe, delayed and wandersome, a lost trek through planetary soundscapes, a questing vision of higher musical consciousness, an escape from the dreary mundane of much of our waking lives.

This is music as transformation, expertise, and skill, and timing, repurposed as a calling. It all coalesces on Music Is Healing: eight minutes of mainlined wonder and childlike visions of eternity, wrapped up in soulful chords and lyrics of hope and endeavour. It’s already had Mr. Peterson’s seal of approval: a future classic without a shadow of a doubt.

There’s magic, then, in these compositions: a one-off, never to be repeated performance from musicians right at the top of their game. Lightning in a bottle, captured on wax, the eternal quest for a better world, a more loving world, a world in which melody replaces malignancy. We can all dream, right?

Charlie Stacey’s The Light Beyond Time is out now, on Night Dreamer.