US: iTunes, Amazon CD, Amazon MP3
Canada: iTunes, Amazon CD
[Listen to Portico in the Nextplayer]
Portico Quartet are four young musicians from South London who sound like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Living and playing together they describe their ethos as like an Indy band that plays post-jazz, and their unique sound has won them fans from Gilles Peterson to Radio 4 and Notion to BBC Music Magazine. Knee-Deep was Time Out’s Jazz, Folk and World music album of the year for 2007 and is a Nationwide Mercury Prize album of the year for 2008.
Portico Quartet are Jack Wyllie (soprano Saxophone), Milo Fitzpatrick (double bass), Nick Mulvey (Hang and percussion) and Duncan Bellamy (drums and Hang), and it’s the mix of ethereal saxophone, flying saucer like Hang (imagine an otherworldly steel drum), clattering drums and earthy double-bass that gives their music it’s inimitable, beautiful sound. It was the chance purchase of the Hang by Duncan Bellamy, at a music festival, that inspired the young friends to start a band, and while their largely intuitive music references jazz and African music it’s the Hang inspired trance-like repetitive patterns of Duncan and Nick Mulvey that propel the band into stranger pastures: invoking Philip Glass and Steve Reich’s gamelan inspired minimalism.
Their dance friendly, melodic brand of hook-heavy post-jazz was honed busking across Europe and playing in unusual spaces; churches, galleries and chill-out zones. A weekly session at the South Bank and residency at the Brixton Ritzy earned them a cult following and inspired London’s hippest jazz club, the Vortex, to start a label to release their music. Sessions on XFM and Radio 1 followed and a storming set at the Glastonbury Festival had Q hailing their ‘danceable chamber jazz soundscapes’ that ‘should make them a Glasto fixture’.
