The Near Jazz Experience is an aptly named trio with rich musical histories who bring a variety of influences into music played on jazz instruments. Multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards and drummer Simon Charterton were members of The Higsons, the first non-ska band signed to 2 Tone Records, and each has also been involved in many other projects. Bassist Mark Bedford is best known as a member of Madness and has also worked with artists such as Voice of the Beehive and Morrissey. Together they create dynamic and catchy instrumental music, which has evolved to incorporate electronic elements to expand the sound palette. They recently released a new album, Tritone, which includes guest musicians such as David Bowie keyboardist Mike Garson and Jamiroquai’s Matt Johnson. Over a Zoom interview, the three members of The Near Jazz Experience discussed the band and their new album.
Before we talk about the album, could you discuss how this project initially came together?
TERRY EDWARDS: Some years ago, the governor of the local pub I went to turned out to be a bit of a music fan. He knew what I’d done and just said, “If you ever want to do anything, come down.” It was a tiny space, almost like a dive bar. We ended up with a residency there about once a month on a Tuesday evening, which is obviously a quiet night for a pub. We got a following that way and started playing improvised music, and over time, elements of it became less improvised the more we did it.
How do you feel the project has developed over the years?
MARK BEDFORD: Well, I mean, we work on and off. We do different things, but we come back to the NJE and pick it up again. This particular record was put together in bits, really. We started out with various drum patterns Simon would send us, and then we’d work on those. So it was a cumulative thing where we just built and built and built until we finally had the record. That’s what makes it different from how we perform live. Live, we work within a sort of framework: we turn up and play, and each time it’s different. In the studio, though, there’s a different kind of discipline. We actually built it like a normal record, improvising a bit in the studio, but then adding overdubs to it.
How did the making of Tritone compare with your previous work?
SIMON CHARTERTON: This one came out of the COVID period originally. I was lucky enough to have a drum kit set up in a big old cinema, which meant I could record various drum tracks on an iPhone and then send them around. We were sending things to each other and developing it that way. So it was very different from how we’d worked before.
TERRY EDWARDS: I think the actual recording of it was similar to what we usually do, because basically we had patterns, plans, and tunes we’d worked on separately. Then, when we could all get together and record, we did it live without a click track—sort of as we usually do—but this time with a little more preparation.
Did you have any concrete musical ideas in mind going into making the album? And if so, how might that have changed as you actually started working and sending things back and forth?
SIMON CHARTERTON: I’m not sure we had concrete ideas, but we had various bits and different influences. I think we threw a lot of different stuff into the album, and it just emerged over the year or so with different aspects. As you hear, it ranges quite a lot in style on this album.
Could you talk about your influences?
TERRY EDWARDS: We have different influences that have built up through the way we’ve played our instruments over however many years, and some of them aren’t too obvious to an outsider. But the three of us know each other well enough to know what we like and where we’ve come from. Generally speaking, a pithy way of putting it is that we basically play rock and blues music—but on jazz instruments.
MARK BEDFORD: Yeah. I mean, you are the sum of your influences, I suppose. We listen to lots of different music, and I think that’s what comes through. I don’t think we feel particularly tied to jazz. We also come from a pop background, so there’s always that—we like a good hook as well. But, I mean, you are always the sum of your influences. I think this record allowed us to develop a little bit more and bring those things in. I could give you a list if you want, but it would be a lot of different things.
Your music seems like it would appeal to multiple audiences, and of course you all have built-in fanbases from past projects. Do you think about who your target market is for the band, or how you want to promote the music?
TERRY EDWARDS: I think the best way to do it is to make music you’d like to listen to yourself. At that point, you’re then—personally, I’m an evangelist about it. I think this is a great record, and I want other people to hear it because I like it. But I don’t think we tap into an algorithm or anything in particular. Similarly, we don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner or make deliberately difficult music. We do things we want to listen to—that’s what it is.
So even if some people don’t think it’s that commercial, I think it is, because I think there’s an audience. I think it’s called the “long tail,” isn’t it, in the business? There are the big hits up front, but then there’s a big tail of music that people like which might seem niche to some—or not—but they’re big old niches out there, I think.
Could you talk about the collaborators you worked with on this album—how they came up and what they brought to the tracks?
MARK BEDFORD: Well, I could talk about Matt Johnson, who plays with Jamiroquai. I didn’t know him at all—it was only because of the magic of the internet. I saw him play and thought he might suit something we were doing. He liked what he heard and said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll play on it.” And of course, these days, with the luxury of being able to record from home, it’s so much easier. You can send stuff over and they can put their part down.
SIMON CHARTERTON: There’s a guy called Oliver Cherer who plays on it—he added bits of synth and things. He actually lives about 200 yards away from me down in St. Leonard’s. He has a band called Aircooled, and he also plays with Miki Berenyi in her trio. He just seemed like someone I knew would add the right little touches we wanted. This album has quite a lot of electronic elements, and he seemed like the right guy. He did some great stuff, and that’s how he got involved.
TERRY EDWARDS: I’d worked with Mike Garson on a couple of short tours in the UK. He’s the piano player who did Aladdin Sane—Bowie’s pianist—and he’s a lovely, very genuine guy. I sent him an email, told him what we were up to, and he said, “Oh, I’d love to hear it.” So I sent him a couple of tracks and asked if he’d like to play on something and how much it would cost. Within 24 hours he sent over that monumental piano solo he did on “Character Actor” and just said, “There you go. Do what you want with it.”
I think a lot of musicians like what we do, and if you just ask, they’re happy to play on it. Same with Paul Cuddeford, the guitarist.
Was it obvious all along that you wanted the core band to be a trio?
TERRY EDWARDS: I think it was always going to be a trio, just because it was a fun thing. Originally it was simply, bring your instruments, play, put them in their cases, and go home. That’s just what we would do. But I think the sum of everything we do with the NJE is something none of us could come up with individually. It could only come from the collaborative process we go through.
We all do our own separate things, which is perfectly fine, but this particular project is a lovely collaboration—and it just works for us. We’re happy to bring in other people every now and then, but live trios are good, fun trios are good to play in.
For those who haven’t been able to see you live, could you talk about your approach, or how the energy might differ from the recordings?
MARK BEDFORD: I think live it’s a lot looser. The way I’d describe it is that if someone had heard the album, they’d certainly recognize the tracks, but we probably wouldn’t play them verbatim. We wouldn’t play them note for note. We use the framework of those songs and then just play and see where it goes. I suppose that’s the improvisational part. Even though we have some idea of what we’re going to start with, it can go in different directions—that’s how it works live, really. I think that’s the main difference between live and recorded.
Are there any particular songs that you feel have a noticeably different feel live?
TERRY EDWARDS: Funnily enough, we were doing a soundcheck at a couple of gigs in Norway recently. At the one in Oslo, we started playing along with a drone in the key of “Bebinca Beat,” one of the tracks on the album, but slowed down. I just started playing that melody, and we all began improvising around the tune. You’d recognize it because the melody is there, but it wasn’t slavish to it. Those are the kinds of tangents we like to go off on. It just means you don’t repeat yourself slavishly. We don’t deliberately try to make things different, but it’s in the nature of the music. They’re different from time to time.
SIMON CHARTERTON: And we might stretch one song live into another with an extended percussion or shaker solo, so the lengths can vary from the recordings. Sometimes we merge one track into another as well.
TERRY EDWARDS: There’s a live album, Live in London, that’s up on the streaming services.
Since you all have rich musical histories, what do each of you feel you creatively get out of working with this project? Maybe things you’re not able to do with other projects, or haven’t done in the past. What does this represent creatively versus your other work?
MARK BEDFORD: Well, for me, it’s a different way of working. Normally, when I play, I have to—and people pay money for me to—play songs exactly as they are. That’s the huge difference between what I do in Madness and what the NJE does. So it’s just a completely different mindset. It’s a different way of thinking about things, a different way of playing music. I suppose it’s simplistic to say there’s more freedom, but it wouldn’t be far wrong. It makes you think differently about playing. For me, that’s what I get from the NJE.
TERRY EDWARDS: I think that sonically, both Mark and I don’t use as much electronics in our other projects. I’d only ever put the saxophone through foot pedals once or twice before, and now it’s a big part of the sound. It wasn’t originally, but we’ve progressed into that since our first foray into improvising. That sends you off in another direction. You hear yourself in a way you haven’t before, and therefore you play differently than you would with other people. And I think Simon’s use of his Wavedrum is part of that too.
SIMON CHARTERTON: I actually use electronic drums in quite a lot of other projects. But my difference is more about where I live—down on the South Coast in a small place where, per person, there are probably more musicians per square foot than anywhere else I’ve ever been. You can do five gigs in a week within five minutes of your house. The major difference for me with this band is that I’ve been to the Arctic Circle three times, which I wouldn’t have otherwise done, I think.
Could you elaborate a little more on the use of electronics and processing of instruments? Did it take experimentation to determine how it fits the sound?
TERRY EDWARDS: I think it was just a case of, “let’s see how this works.” It’s a purely instrumental band—no lyrics, no vocals—so obviously the saxophone and trumpet take on that monophonic aspect of music. But you can add harmonies on the fly as you go. We don’t really do looping; we don’t click loops in. We might put in various prerecorded bits, maybe. For me, I’m still finding my way with it, and it’s just kind of fun—it’s like being put in a toy room or something.
SIMON CHARTERTON: And it sounds like a toy room sometimes.
TERRY EDWARDS: It certainly does, yeah. [laughs]
SIMON CHARTERTON: The main thing is that when we first started doing this, we had none of the electronic stuff. Bit by bit, I added the Wavedrum to my kit, and Mark has a footboard of various things. It’s gradually morphed from purely acoustic—or electroacoustic—into being a mixture of that with electronics. It’s a sort of hybrid, and an interesting one: neither fully one thing nor the other.
Even on the album, you can hear tracks that might essentially be blues or a conventional form, but they drift into areas that are sonically quite different from what you’d expect. You might have a drone, or some strange synth noises underneath what is essentially a saxophone solo.
MARK BEDFORD: The sounds are mostly used for texture and ambiance, to give another layer and maybe shift the mood of a song or what we’re doing at the time. It just adds a kind of depth, really. As Terry said, it’s not sequenced—it’s mainly sound. Different samples of sound as well.
The music often has a cinematic feel to it. Given that you don’t use vocals, I’m wondering if you’re thinking in terms of storytelling as you create songs.
MARK BEDFORD: I mean, there’s obviously a visual aspect to it. You can always associate visual things with what you’re doing musically. But with lyrics, they always turn a song in a certain direction and give you a clear idea of what the song or tune is about. With us, it’s different—we’re playing instrumental music, so instead of a fixed story, you’re trying to link it to various feelings. For me, it’s more about creating a feeling than a literal visual image.
Given that you work on other projects as well, how much of a focus is Near Jazz Experience?
SIMON CHARTERTON: I think it depends on how busy everybody is. The other two in the band have been very busy this year, so we haven’t been doing as much. But we’re now actively planning a few things to promote this new album. There have also been periods in the past when we’ve had a lot more time to work on things. So really, it fluctuates depending on how much time each of us can give.
The music industry has changed a lot throughout your careers. How do you feel it may have been different launching a project like this in the past, or earlier in your careers?
TERRY EDWARDS: Well, the elephant in the room is we’re all older than we were when we started doing this. What’s been freeing about this project is that we truly haven’t chased the charts with this music. That’s been good because it means you follow your nose more, play what you want to play and hear, rather than what you think will further your career. In a sense, that bloody-mindedness makes for better music. And there is an audience out there for it, I think.
Of course, it’s a different world now in terms of how you actually put things out. And Mark often says, what does an album even mean these days? But we still think that way, and I think it holds up.
This record in particular, although it has different influences and sounds, has a homogeneity to it. Once we cooked it up and recorded it, we did it all in the same place in a relatively short amount of time, so it sounds like a narrative—all the tunes belong together, even if some are more disparate than others. They all have the three of us on them, and that brings cohesion. In the past, you might have focused on a couple of singles from an album, but I don’t think we’re tied to that. We want to make every song as important as the others.
SIMON CHARTERTON: And I think that’s absolutely right. Back when we were younger, Terry and I were in a band where we chased all sorts of things—going in all sorts of directions—never really sure what The Higsons were trying to do. With this project, we’re infinitely more relaxed. We just play music that could come from anywhere: something Terry has, the sound of a Wavedrum, absolutely anything can spark a track.
And as Terry pointed out in another interview, the album we’ve come up with is very much like an old-fashioned album. It’s a bit like “Low” or something like that, where you’ve got six short tracks and four longer tracks, and it just works. We’re very old-school without really intending to be. That’s probably just the way we think—thinking in terms of albums as they were when we used to pick them up at the Record and Tape Exchange back in the day.
Now that the album is out, what’s in the future for the band?
TERRY EDWARDS: The next one.
We’ll be promoting this record for a while. It’s not like the pop thing where you “drop” a record, it goes straight in at number one, and the following week it drops back to number 43. This is an album not just for Christmas; it’s for life. It’s going to be around for a while.
We’ll promote it, introduce new tunes into the set, and then move on from there. We have some live shows coming up, some in-store appearances too. It’s dotted around our three diaries, really, that’s just the way we work. It’s a practical band in that respect.
For more info, visit thenje.co.uk. Purchase music at thenje.bandcamp.com.
