New Year 1995

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Reflections on Steve Argüelles and Busy Listening by guitarist Billy Jenkins

'Ready everyone?'
I gave the knowing look that puts musicians on the metaphorical starting blocks. Those on the stage drew breath and concentrated their faculties, whilst those in the audience hushed down and gave themselves to the band. I hesitated, waiting for that exact moment to shatter the silence.
Tension.
You could hear a pin drop.
Everyone that is except Steve Argüelles.
He jerked up from his ever-ridiculous drumkit, jabbed his sticks towards the nearby exit and said, 'Wait until that's turned off.'
'That' was an air-conditioning unit on setting one.
Nobody heard it until this presumed upstart of a drummer pointed it out. Then everybody heard it.

Steve Argüelles - native of Birmingham, England.
Born 1963 in the Beat Boom.
Still going beat boom.
Flared trousers and the Jackson Five preceded puberty.
Then improvised tympani and snare with the secondary school orchestra. 'Well, it got boring with very little notation and the conductor either liked it or didn't notice.'

Obtaining a full drumkit (that means at least one object per limb to hit), here was one player determined to avoid the accepted Brummie treadmill of factory work, production lines and loud industrial workplaces - hard rock and heavy metal never was his main interest.

Instead jazz and improvisation (via, aged 13, a brush with what must have been one of the seminal UK Bhangra groups) took him at 18 to London, full-time music and the start of a geographical and musical exploration that continues. As a Country & Western songwriter once said, 'Anyone who says it takes five minutes to write a song is lying. It takes five minutes and the experience of a lifetime.'
For Argüelles, the sign on his much-travelled van could legitimately say, 'Birmingham, Brixton, Barcelona, Basel'. And we're not talking one-night stands. We're talking 100% relocation. For, by 1990, when he left England, he knew what had gone before in the preceding decade was perhaps too fantastic to perpetuate.

Consider what has occurred.
As the roughly once-every-ten-years jazz boom came around and the media homed in and selected key user-friendly faces, Argüelles was playing with the ones whose music can be remembered - Loose Tubes and Human Chain, with Django Bates and Stuart Hall and the Iains with Iain Ballamy.

'A potent time,' fall out of Steve's mouth as a crisp triplet and crotchet. Two points of reference for the runt drummer from Brum are the pianist John Taylor and the late Dudu Pukwana. Both offered and gave invaluable lessons on and off the stand. Other collaborations and music making occurred with Mose Allison, Alex Balanescu, George Coleman, Palle Danielson, Slim Galliard, Mike Gibbs, Jimmy Giuffre, Steve Lacy, Hugh Maskela, Chris McGregor, Michael Nyman, WDR Radio Orchestra, Louis Sclavis, John Surman, Toots Thielemans and many other internationally known musicians. Some of these associations continue to this day and encompass music for film, theatre, dance and production work.

Argüelles and some of his closer UK peers have been criticised in the past for lightweight flippancy and triviality - jocularity being deemed disrespectful to the genre. But the presumption is wrong. When Steve plays, he smiles because he is happy. And when a smile precedes a period of sensual musical beauty it is perhaps forgivable that such sensitivity might be interpreted as satire.
Again, though, the interpretation is wrong.
We are musicians. Sound is our business.
And what do we listen to in this day and age? Unsurprisingly, living in a large city, a hell of a lot.

We hear everything - not just music.

No wonder the expressive parameters are so broad.

Argüelles, like some of his associates, is not only a player but also a composer and, in his preferred words, 'an active collaborator'.
By spending time playing with local musicians and aurally observing in the aforementioned European locations, his work has blossomed in a unique way. Since moving to Paris in 1992, his music has taken on a truly 'world' feel. Its emotional diversity is the only realistic response to this almighty din of a machine-driven global ghetto blaster upon which we exist.

Parisian pianist Benoît Delbecq, who with Steve and guitarist Noel Akchoté record and perform as The Recyclers, offered these thoughts on 'Our Man In Europe'.

'Steve is like no other drummer. It is not like playing with a drummer and he changes the way you look at drummers. He's not playing, he's painting.' Argüelles himself has stated that he wanted to play in a way that anyone could play and to try to engage people in my music'.
Perhaps that is why Delbecq hears in him 'the presence of the child'.

By living outside the UK, Argüelles can appreciate the strength of our players from outside. He feeds back valuable insights into the respect held for our home-grown artists, whilst vigorously canvassing in the fields in their support. So while The Recyclers are one of his Paris-based projects, the band Argüelles which was formed with his brother Julian in 1985, is now Steve's main UK unit - Julian cordially stepping aside as co-leader to lead his own quartet. When composing he places great emphasis on the sound of the band and he writes with its instrumentation in mind 'It is a sound he describes as folkloric'.

Alto saxophonist Julian Argüelles (b.l966) is usually a tenor man, but here he returns to his first instrument. 'I can remember the first notes he played,' says Steve, 'and being so close means we have instant rapport. An honest relationship.'
'The problem is,' said Steve out of nothing one day in his van as we passed the next M4 turn off like we passed the four before, 'the click of the On switch of the radio doesn't excite any more...'

It was so sad and true a statement we gave up talking till Swindon.
Writing these programme notes three years later, it makes me very happy to know that Steve's astute observation could not in any way be associated with his own music making.

THE CLICK OF THE STICK STILL EXCITES HIM AND WILL YOU TOO.

LET'S GET BUSY LISTENING.