ANNOUNCING THE DEBUT ALBUM FROM
THE COUNCIL OF 9
“Really cool” – Gilles Peterson, BBC 6 Music
Dynamic conceptual jazz collective The Council Of 9 release their debut album Times 9.
This thing was cut at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, but that’s just geography. What it really is: nine transmissions, nine pressure systems of rhythm and sound, all circling the same strange gravitational idea—that music might actually be a way of bending time when nobody’s looking directly at it.
Times 9 doesn’t sit still long enough to behave like a normal record. It moves like a convoy at night with the headlights off—classic jazz, world textures, spiritual drift, all bleeding into each other until you stop trying to label anything and just listen harder. Uniting an eclectic group of superb musicians from the UK and beyond, the result is a record thick with detail and depth—contemporary precision cutting straight through the haze, classic jazz warmth still burning underneath it all, all of it caught in a moment of terrifyingly good fidelity, like someone finally managed to bottle the air in the room without killing what was inside it.
Nine compositions. Each one locked to a successive time signature, like someone keeps changing the road beneath the tyres. The ensemble starts small—just drums in open space—and then the thing begins to accumulate bodies, ideas, heat. By the time you realise what’s happening, it’s already a nine-piece organism and still growing in your ears.
Chris Gale puts it in numbers, but it isn’t really numbers. “There are references everywhere to nine,” he says. “Tesla talked about 3, 6, 9 as if they were keys to something larger. Maybe they are. Maybe it’s just a way of pointing at something we already feel but can’t quite hold still.”
And then he backs off the theory and gets to the point that actually matters: it’s about the music. The playing. The moment it all locks and nobody’s steering anymore. “If people hear honesty, truth, beauty, goodness—then we’ve done it right.”
James Peake is in there too, holding the edges of the thing together without tightening them too much. They’ve been building this language together since school—long before it had a name, long before it needed one.
The Grateful Dead sit somewhere in the background like a ghost influence—less a sound than a permission structure. Improvisation as a way of not knowing where you’re going until you get there.
Most of Times 9 was recorded live, fast, alive—few takes, no safety net worth mentioning. The lineup shifts as needed. Nothing is fixed. Not even the number nine, really. That’s just the sign on the door.
What matters is what comes through when the tape is rolling and nobody’s pretending to control the weather inside the music.
