"Big Teddy & The Feline Recyclists" 

Club 276.

Club 276 is not all it pretends to be. The press release from Star Falcon Productions calls it,

"An inviting piece in the puzzle that is the mixed metaphor at the turtle head of Sydney's jazz scene, going forward."

Club 276 is in fact the buffet of The Pymble Hotel, and so much less. Therefore when Big Teddy and his baritone sax take to the stage the audience of three unemployed locals and a mangy blue cattle dog with two legs on it's right side hopping past do little to bring to mind the glory days of Blue Note or The El Rocco Jazz Cellar.

Pumble on a Wednesday lunchtime is probably not the ideal place for free jazz. Nonetheless the ever optimistic Big Teddy Brownstain embraces the limitations of the event, literally reveling in the aura of lukewarm apathy shed by the three unemployed laborers, none of whom would assist this reviewer with either a name or drink, as if they were a blanket of Wembley applause. Likewise the dog and the barmaid with her ear and half nose lost to the second hand Winfield smoke of the 80s and an over-reused colostomy tube resting fly-strewn under the sad pap that escape from her oily VB wife-beater singlet.  

The Feline Recyclists consisted on the day of Big Teddy's sister Anais "Nun" Brownstain on drums, Jackson "Ice Debt" Jackson on trombone, and his 18 year old brother Ornette "Tap Fitting" Jackson on 3/4 double bass (formerly of The Cuddy Blunts). They make an immediately noticeable entrance, if as much for their smell as for their grasp and dismissal of Western conventions of melody, harmony and rhythm. This music is 'new' and 'free' in the same way as the the turd ol' two-legged Bluey just laid by the front of the bar is new and free.

Big Teddy, it would seem, can't help but smile. Even with oily chips being thrown at him from the disgruntled patron eating lunch and complaining that he just put three Cold Chisel songs on the jukebox and can't hear them for Big Teddy's caterwauling, not to mention the seemingly random onomatopoeic attack on the concept of 'time' itself by Ice Debt, Tap Fitting and Nun.

By the end of the first set the audience have stuffed their ears with hamburger buns, but Ice Debt for one is having none of it - climbing down from the tiny podium and placing his trombone horn directly against the ears of witless patrons in what Big Teddy announces from the stage is a musical statement in solidarity with jailed 19th Century Sardinian xylophonic auteur Antoni "Il Minsh" Cagliari.

I'm enjoying the jazz here - Anais Nun's heavy Vic Firth brush work taking Tap Fitting's 3/4 double bass somewhere it clearly doesn't want to go. Meanwhile Big Teddy's baritone sax seems to exclaim "I don't want to attend you mother's wedding"all through the subtle use of augmented 5ths. The whole melange is somewhat unbalanced precariously over the thwump and hoot of Ice Debt's ongoing battle with the ever more aggressive table of glow-vested patrons.

Big Teddy at this points begins a series of projectile flattened 7th regurgitations through the tubing of his antique Italian instrument - a clever tonal device first utilized on stage at The Algerian New Jazz Bash of 1962 by Spewing "Stu" Pitamento.

Everyone in "Club 276" is by now rather underwhelmed so the band through a series of well-practiced gestures decide to make good their escape.

The bar applaud their exit but in the interests of full and frank journalism this humble reviewer feels it is necessary to witness the remainder of their evening. Unfortunately Ice Debt at the wheels takes my trailing and horn beeps rather defensively and hence looses control of his mother's vehicle by the side of the local railways station.

The unemployed laborers later pick through their remains like crows at the bodies of unwell aliens (see picture).

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MN