Six years on from their first album, “Standard Time” the hyperactive, intensely creative Trio HLK return with the long-awaited follow-up, “Anthropometricks”, and a launch concert at Kings Place. Like its predecessor, “Anthropometricks” is more than a three-person effort… Feature by Rob Adams

“With ‘Standard Time’ we were finding our voice; with ‘Anthropometricks’ we’re raising the bar.”

Rich Harrold’s confident assessment of Trio HLK’s two albums to date is no idle boast. The distance the group has travelled in the six years since they recorded the deeply impressive “Standard Time” is significant, and the confidence in Harrold’s words is mirrored in the music on its extraordinarily accomplished successor.

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Trio HLK comprises Harrold on piano and synths, Ant Law on eight-string guitar and Rich Kass on drums and percussion. On “Standard Time” they were joined by percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, whom they identified – correctly – as someone who might be up for the challenge of playing their rhythmically intricate compositions.

Dame Evelyn returns on “Anthropometricks”, having toured with the group across the UK and Europe, and she has expressed her delight at being involved, as have the two other guests who lend their musicianship to the new album.

Cellist Natalie Clein and vocalist Varijashree Venugopal add an orchestral approach and considerable vocal elasticity respectively to Trio HLK’s palette of sounds. The cellist also joins Harrold and Law in taking on the role of doubling as the group’s bassist, although that possibility didn’t necessarily lie behind her invitation to play on “Anthropometricks”.

“With Evelyn, we were attracted by her open-mindedness,” says Rich Kass. “We’d listened to her work with Fred Frith especially and thought she would fit in with what we do, and it’s the same with Natalie and Varijashree. I watched a video of Varijashree with B C Manjunath, the brilliant mridangam player, for instance, and I immediately thought that this was someone who could handle the intricacies of the music and add her own personality.”

Intricacy and tricks figure largely in Trio HLK’s compositions and yet the raw material they’re built from comes from the standard jazz repertoire. “Anthropometricks” itself refers to their re-composition of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Anthropology” and elsewhere on the album there’s a familiar influence of Miles Davis’ “All Blues”.

“Our music is littered with metric modulations and metric tricks,” says Ant Law. “So we thought “Anthropometricks” was an appropriate title.”

Rich Harrold concedes that a core part of Trio HLK is about playing tricks with the listener but at the same time, they’re in the business of communicating. Your correspondent can vouch for the ability of the melodic lines and fragments to quickly register and become hummable in a way that might be said to hark back to the origins of TV’s The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Evelyn Glennie marvels at the apparent effortlessness with which Harrold, Law and Kass handle their involved and highly evolved compositions but behind this ease lies a lot of work.

“When we’re not touring, we try to keep the group ticking over by playing together in the same room – we don’t rehearse by Zoom or Skype – for a decent amount of time at least once a month,” says Harrold. With Kass based just outside Edinburgh, Harrold in Manchester and Law in London, this requires dedication and determination.

“We’ll work on parts individually and then when we get together the idea is to become comfortable with the time signatures and rhythmical figures, so that everything becomes natural – like breathing, really,” Harrold adds.

Ultimately the idea is for each piece, as with music of more or less any style, to become a journey for the listener from start to finish.

“Our compositions evolve through rehearsals, firstly, and then through performance,” says Kass. “We’ve played together a lot now, both as a trio and as a quartet with Evelyn, and there’s room for the music to develop and for new ideas to be added through improvisation.”

“There’s a lot of counterpoint in what we do,” adds Law, “and we’re very excited to be welcoming two new voices, in Natalie and Varijashree, into this expanded line-up. I think this is going to open things up and allow us to explore the music in greater depth. It’ll be really interesting to hear where we take the music together.”

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“Anthropometricks” is released on Ubuntu Music today, Friday 15 March 2024, and will be launched at Kings Place, London on Friday 14 June as part of Scotland Unwrapped – BOOKINGS