British jazzer taps into the spirt of Canterbury on latest solo endeavour.
ON THE DAY Prog speaks to him, session gun and solo artist Ben Reed is re-shelving and re-alphabetising his enormous vinyl collection. He has around 10,000 records, only a few of them on CD, and he doesn’t do digital – he’s never downloaded nor streamed a song in his life.“I would never listen to music digitally,”he says from his cosy attic studio in west London.“One of the main incentives of making music for me is to see it spinning on my turntable.”
Well worth a spin, his excellent current album Bandaged is his fourth solo work after 2004 debut Tall Story, Who Dreams Of Hyssop (2009) and Station Masters (2016). As a jobbing bassist, Reed’s played for a diverse roster of hip artists on the XL and Domino labels, and notably appears on Blond, the smash hit album from progressive hip hop star Frank Ocean, and David Byrne’s 2018 LP, American Utopia. There was a day in the studio with the“absolutely lovely” Peter Gabriel in 2016, and while that material never saw the light of day, it points to Reed’s own proggy leanings.
“All paths were leading to prog for me since I was a child,” says this music obsessive.“The first album I ever owned was Moog Party Time [1973 compilation]. My parents had Beethoven symphonies, Holst’s Planets and Geoff Love’s Big Love Movie Themes. Then my hippie uncle gave me the [1968] Island sampler, You Can All Join In and that’s how I discovered stuff like Fairport Convention and Traffic.”
At just eight years old his mind was blown by Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive, Zappa’s Hot Rats, and In The Court Of The Crimson King. A cool teacher gave him Close To The Edge, and Yes have been the musical love of his life ever since – Chris Squire was his first bass inspiration, along with Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era sideman, Trevor Bolder.
