Having not heard of the OCT-Loft Jazz Festival held annually in the Nanshan district of Shenzhen, I assumed the “Loft Jazz Series” label on the cover of A Mountain Sees a Mountain was a reference to the 70s New York loft scene. This assumption quickly fell apart, of course; I remembered that percussionist Hamid Drake, though based in the city, only began performing a decade after rising rents and institutionalization brought that boom to an end, and that pianist Pat Thomas is English. While the series name may or may not be an homage, OCT-Loft references the area surrounding the OCT metro station, where the two free music heavyweights played as a duo for the first time in 2019. Six years later (to the day), their extended live session sees new life as a multi-format release on the record label arm of Old Heaven, the bookstore that curates the festival and serves as the venue for its performances. Drake and Thomas have met before in larger ensembles (twice on record, both at OTO via various configurations of Thomas’s Black Top project with Orphy Robinson) and their chemistry sits in a sweet spot between established rapport and boundless possibility. Thomas fires off a flurry of muscular dissonance to match Drake’s thumping intro to “The Spider’s Web,” but then they drop into a slow textural build that morphs into a lurching swing. Thomas deals in both convention and abstraction interchangeably: there are several electric moments when he’s banging out thick erratic five-finger clash chords or dizzying atonal right-hand runs, and then suddenly a surging groove appears as if out of nowhere. Drake’s hits and rolls are as raw and painterly as ever, but his singing doesn’t work as well here as it has elsewhere. “Friday the 13th,” the first of two brief encores, is a fleeting but thrilling climax that offers a glimpse of the raucous glory the duo could have worked up if they’d wanted to, but their restraint makes it all the more satisfying. Though the circumstances that led to this lovely hour of music may not be directly connected to the historic loft era, its eternal spirit is alive and well—this is the sound of community, of two artists separated by one ocean crossing yet another to meet an eager audience. As Drake himself says in “Time for Learning”: “This is something that we’re all doing together as one spirit, one family, you know, one love, one light, one harmony. One light.”
Noise Not Music 