Jazz
Fundacja Słuchaj · 6 March 2026
“Lublin” runs twenty-one and a half minutes and “Emerging” eighteen: between them they take up more than half of the seventy-six minutes of The First Touch. These are the pieces the trio stakes the record on, and what happens in them is a run of metamorphoses. Trevor Watts’s alto starts up in the high register, Barry Guy’s bass answers with the bow, and two minutes later the music is something else entirely without anyone being able to say who turned the wheel.
Tomasz Kraśkiewicz recorded it at the Cultural Centre in Lublin on 19 July 2025, during the city’s jazz festival, and it was mixed and mastered in Barcelona by Ferran Conangla at FMC Studio. The capture is honest about what happened that night, shouts of encouragement from the stage included.
In the liner notes, Guy explains that it was Watts who first put him in front of free improvisation, in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and calls him “a guiding light”. You can hear it in how they divide the work: Guy alternates bow and pizzicato, low and high, harshness and lyricism, and Watts answers without having to take every idea to the edge. When “Birth Of The Voice” closes on a singable alto phrase looking back toward the African American tradition, it’s clear where all this freedom comes from.
The third name is the one you’d least expect at a meeting like this. Ramón López, born in Alicante in 1961 and based in Paris since January 1985, isn’t here as an accompanist: his drumming arrives in waves, with cymbals that sizzle and strikes that cut in, and more often than not it’s him who decides when a piece changes density.
The way the record is weighted is harder to defend. After “Emerging” nothing reaches ten minutes, and the five that remain (from 5:10 to 9:31) sound like what came after the main event. At a concert played straight through that makes perfect sense; on a record you put on again, the second half sags.
Seven tracks, seventy-six minutes, released by Fundacja Słuchaj on 6 March. Watts and Guy were already sharing a bandstand in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1966; they are 87 and 79 today.
Rating: 8/10
Text by Aina Torrents