Archiefishal Intelligence

Archie the Goldfish is a multi-country project co-led by guitarist Chris Bestwick and trumpeter Graeme Flowers.

On their fifth release, they return to their instrumental roots with a 5-track EP of guitar-led tunes richly decorated by layers of trumpets and flugelhorns, all supported by the warm, responsive drumming of Argentinian Bernardo Yacono. In a cultural landscape where AI is blurring the lines between human- and algorithmically-created art, and where text-prompts to AI engines can cost more than finished human artworks, they try to explore what makes music distinctly human, to show that artificial intelligence is currently no match for Archiefishal Intelligence.

As one of the UK's most in-demand trumpet players, Graeme has performed with jazz stars such as Quincy Jones, Gregory Porter, Manu Katché, Michael Bublé, Kyle Eastwood, Tom Scott, Charlie Hunter and Deodato. On the pop/commercial side he's worked with Taylor Swift, Cee Lo Green, Tom Jones, Simply Red, Paul Weller, Duran Duran, and many others. He has also performed on, and written music for, three Clint Eastwood movie soundtracks.

After playing on the London jazz scene for many years, getting drunk on JTQ tours with Graeme, backing pop singers, and performing at Womad and similar festivals in the UK and abroad with Algerian, Moroccan and Turkish musicians, Chris has spent the last few years writing for and leading projects in Helsinki, Prishtina and The Hague.

Recorded in Helsinki, London and Buenos Aires by: Chris Bestwick - guitar and bass,
Graeme Flowers - trumpet and flugelhorn Bernardo Yacono - drums

Compositions by Chris Bestwick, Horn parts by Graeme Flowers

Published by Sentric Music Publishing
Released by Funkiwala Records

EP Info

"It was seeing a Midjourney prompt for sale for $3 that tipped me over the edge. A few words from which a large language model, trained on the creativity of others, would generate an image, were supposedly worth three times what we charged for our single tracks, tracks that were created by musicians with 150 years of collective experience. (Yes, we're old.)

I started wondering whether musicians could be thought of as large music models, our years of experience and training based on the artistic expressions of our peers and predecessors allowing us to create new works. In this analogy, compositions might be the prompts, so I wrote some tunes and gave them to my friends and collaborators.

The melodies were intentionally (relatively) simple, and the idea was to have only a little conventional jazz soloing. The guitarist Peter Bernstein has described jazz as a

decorative art, and the intention here was simply to decorate the melodies in as creative a way as possible.

We took this approach because this kind of embellishment might, perhaps, be something that AI-generated music could be expected to achieve. But I don't think AI could have produced what we have made here, and that gives me some sense of relief and hope. For now, at least, artificial intelligence is no match for (apologies) Archiefishal Intelligence. How long that continues remains to be seen."

Chris Bestwick, September 2023