If you’re out and about in central London then there’s just time to get down to the South Bank Centre where there’s a great chance to catch Get the Blessing perform in the intimate setting of the  Front Room for Friday Tonic. The Front Room gig is also a unique chance to hear the band with guest drummer Daisy Palmer from Goldfrapp in for Clive Deamer. Get The Blessing, as previously reported in jazzwisemagazine.com before Christmas, are returning after an absence of more than two years since their last album Bugs In Amber.

OC DC, out on 5 March is their first for Salisbury-based label Naim jazz and the new album has eight numbers so expect a few previews tonight to follow tasters in Bristol and Bath at the tail end of 2011. Title track ‘OC DC’; ‘Americano Meccano’; ‘Torque’; ‘Adagio in Wot Minor’; ‘Between Fear and Sex’; ‘The Waiting’; ‘Low Earth Orbit’; and ‘Pentopia’, are the ones to listen out for and check the monstrous bass opening to title track ‘OC DC’ if it’s on the set list.

The new material draws to mind the world of 1970s Brit crime flicks and this connection to the likes of Get Carter goes back to the early days of Portishead, which Get The Blessing owes a direct lineage to as the seminal trip hop band played to live screenings of the film in their early days. The Get The Blessing sound is remarkable for its “behind the beat” post-hard bop and trip hop feel and the recessed rhythms of Barr, the guiding light with Deamer of Get The Blessing, which originally debuted as The Blessing naming itself after the Ornette Coleman song from Something Else!!!!.

– Stephen Graham