Alabaster DePlume is the alter ego of Gus Fairbairn. It’s hard to find anyone more eccentric, honest and creative than him.
An Alabaster DePlume performance is never just a performance. The British multi-talent interrupts his music to share anecdotes and recite poetry. In everything he does, he puts humanity before product. His compositions can be smooth as silk at times, but he is also known to throw in disorienting improvisation as well.
As a teen, he was in a rock band that deliberately played absolutely nothing in 4/4. Later on, he started living together with a gang of “chaotic guitarists” in a house in Manchester that was nicknamed “Dark Manor”. In 2015, he moved to London. It was there that he joined the Total Refreshment Centre, a creative hotbed and the beating heart of the South-London jazz scene.
The saxophonist, composer and activist always shows a fragile side to himself as well. In 2022, he released his double-album “Gold”, an album that was recorded in London and had him invite new musicians every day for two weeks. There were two clear rules: don’t practice in advance and don’t listen to the result afterwards. Only later, DePlume cut down the seventeen hours of recorded music to an impressive collage of deep-cutting songs, combining these with poetry. Alabaster DePlume released a mini-album in the fall of 2024 called “Cremisan: Prologue to a Blade”. He is also set to make his formal debut as a poet and writer through an upcoming book called “Looking for My Value: Prologue to a Blade”.