Alabaster DePlume

Gus Fairbairn, aka Alabaster DePlume, has a pocketful of phrases that he uses all the time whether he’s walking down the street or holding court with musicians and an audience. For a long time the Mancunian would tell anyone who’d listen that they were doing very well. More recently, it’s another phrase which has a similar effect and which belies his unwavering commitment to personal vulnerability and collective politics: “Don’t forget you’re precious.”

A process that is people-first not product-first ensures that the music is unique; often gem-like. Alabaster DePlume’s songs are built on sonorous circular melodies and luminous tones that transmit calmness and generosity in warm waves – unless they’re raging against complacency and the everyday inhumanity of end times capitalism. Most importantly, he brings a valuable transparency to his work. “This is what I’m really doing,” he says. “I want to talk about why I’m doing this, and how I’m doing this.

The Manchester-born, London-based songwriter, saxophonist, poet and orator Alabaster DePlume, prepares the release of a brand new record, Come With Fierce Grace is drawn from the same sessions as Alabaster’s much-lauded double LP GOLD (which was a Pitchfork ‘Best New Music’ in April of 2022, and included in ‘Best Albums of 2022’ lists by NPR Music, Pitchfork, The Guardian and MOJO). Rather than a collection of B-sides, it's a continuation of the organic collaborative and improvisational process that he established... almost as if GOLD has grown a new limb or aged into a new phase.

On the album’s lead single “Did You Know,” singer and drummer Momoko Gill takes the key poem from GOLD and translates it into her own lyrics. Gill had already delivered the message of the poem and sang it across tons of shows with Alabaster - but with her performance on “Did You Know” she lays out her own meaning for the words. In the background of “Did You Know,” you hear Alabaster playing the key melody that accompanied the original poem on GOLD; but here the feeling is re-established by the improvisers who were recreating the arrangement in the moment, purely for the sake of enjoying each other at the time.

In order to record the compositions in his critically-acclaimed 2022 release GOLD, Alabaster DePlume instilled a culture of creativity by leading his ensembles in spontaneous composition and development. To allow them to be present, he kept the musicians constantly creating across several weeks of sessions at London creative hub Total Refreshment Centre. This process resulted in an abundance of material, much more than he could fit onto the initial double LP. After spending most of 2022 touring in support of GOLD, Alabaster spent much of early 2023 revisiting the additional material from those Total Refreshment Centre sessions – adding, subtracting, producing and arranging – resulting in an entirely new album, Come With Fierce Grace.

Come With Fierce Grace is an album made of authentic and unstipulated – yet welcomed – human interaction. It is for the most part an album of instrumentals, with exception of a few vocal features by Momoko Gill (MettaShiba), Falle Nioke, and Donna Thompson. However the instrumentals on this album are much more embryonic and unfiltered than the lush orchestrations heard on Alabaster’s breakout 2020 album To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1. Come With Fierce Grace is perhaps the most raw and candid portrait of Alabaster’s creative compositional process we’ve yet to hear, as he’s captured vividly in the room with his collaborators – stretching, exploring, working to deepen and expand the emotions underlying his melodic and poetic frameworks. Regarding the process, Alabaster cites a similarity to how elements in nature contribute to shared work and beauty without a collective motive – a bee’s own motives result in the delivery of pollen. As he says: “The great thing wants to happen, let us allow it to happen.”

Regarding the origin of the album’s name: On his first trip to perform in the US in March 2022, Alabaster collected messages from individuals, as he asked them if there is anything they would like him to share with his audiences. One message (from a person who preferred to remain anonymous) asked Alabaster to encourage people to “come with fierce grace.”

'upbeat and tentatively triumphant'
Stereogum

'Alabaster has done it again'
Giles Peterson

'[DePlume] delivers a serene reminder of what matters most'
Pitchfork

'DePlume is a fixture on the London avant-jazz scene whose greatest value is openness'
NPR

'He’s a garrulous, heart-on-sleeve rabble-rouser, an anti-cynic keen to reduce the fourth wall to rubble.'
The Observer