Afloat / Afloat In Dub

“I could sit in awe of the talent on show here all day long.” - Neil Hodge Louder Than War… The NJE started out as a basic improvising trio playing a monthly residency in a pub in the East End of London, working themselves up the ranks via The Roundhouse and Chats Palace to Daylight Music at the EFG London Jazz Festival and Pizza Express/Holborn Live. They still find it hard to use the "J-word" to describe their music. "We play instrumental music rooted in rock and blues music - it's just that we use electronics and jazz instruments to do it," says multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards. A good example of this is Terry's trade-mark sound of playing two saxophones at the same time. "I first heard that as a teenager on Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury and The Blockheads rather than Roland Kirk, the godfather of the technique." Drummer Simon Charterton's influences are Little Feat, The Grateful Dead and Krautrock and Mark Bedford is the bassist of Madness so there's a really broad church of inspiration bubbling away here, which is truly not that far away from jazz. Let's just say they took the scenic route to arrive just to the left of 'jazz'. Here you'll find the first studio/live cut-up album including the singles Knife-Edge, Acoustic (pts I & II) and Voodoo Child and eight tracks mixed up and dubbed up by On-U Sound supremo Adrian Sherwood, all in a beautiful PiL-shaped tin.