Alabaster DePlume is the stage name of Angus Fairbairn, known as Gus, a saxophonist, spoken-word poet, composer and bandleader from Manchester, England. Wikipedia gives his birth year as either 1980 or 1981. He began by making what he has described as jagged, noisy music with his brothers, and he learned the saxophone in 2007. In his early twenties he started a jam night with friends in south Manchester, and he took his stage name from a shouted insult from a passing car that sounded like "Alabaster DePlume." Before moving south he worked for Ordinary Lifestyles, a Manchester charity that supports people with disabilities. There he befriended two men with learning disabilities, Cy Lewis and Lee "Shredder" Bowman, and recorded their vocal improvisations on his phone, material that later became the spine of his best-known instrumental record.

His early albums came out on Debt Records: Copernicus: The Good Book of No (2012), on which he sings and plays tenor saxophone and acoustic guitar; The Jester (2013), co-credited with the pianist Daniel Inzani; and Peach (October 2, 2015). In 2015 he moved to London to reinvent himself and took a day job as a teaching assistant in Eltham. His other base was the Total Refreshment Centre, a recording studio, creative hub and performance space in Dalston, in the borough of Hackney. There he ran a monthly night, also called Peach, that paired jazz with spoken-word poetry. He formed a new band for each date and gave the players no time to rehearse, partly so that they could not fall back on a prepared part, partly to challenge himself and partly to bring different communities into one room. Photographs filed on Wikimedia Commons place him at the Manchester Jazz Festival in July 2016 and at a Daylight Music concert in December 2017.

Lost Map Records issued his singles "Be Nice to People" (2017) and "What Do We Want" (2018) and the album The Corner of a Sphere on May 4, 2018. The record that widened his audience was To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1, released on February 28, 2020 through International Anthem, the Chicago label, with Lost Map. It turned the sessions with Cy and Lee into wordless, slow-moving saxophone pieces, and the keyboardist Dan "Danalogue" Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and the drummer Sarathy Korwar are among the roughly two dozen players who helped build the recordings out at the Total Refreshment Centre. Fairbairn has said the instrumentals were easier to take in than the poems on his earlier albums. That year he also released the Visit Croatia EP (July 20, 2020, International Anthem) and the album I Was Not Sleeping with Danalogue (November 20, 2020, Total Refreshment Centre), and he was a featured guest on Soccer96's single "I Was Gonna Fight Fascism."

Gold (Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love) followed on April 1, 2022 on International Anthem. It was recorded in the summer of 2020, over two weeks at the Total Refreshment Centre. Each day he invited a different group of musicians into the studio, among them the drummers Tom Skinner and Sarathy Korwar, the bassist Tom Herbert, the pianist Matthew Bourne and the singer-guitarist Rozi Plain, and deliberately left too little time to rehearse, so that nobody could hide behind prepared material and everyone had to listen and respond. Pitchfork gave it 8.4 out of 10 and its Best New Music designation, it holds a Metacritic score of 81, and it placed 40th on The Guardian's list of the best albums of 2022 and 42nd on Mojo's. Come with Fierce Grace, recorded in the same 2020 sessions, followed on September 8, 2023, with Momoko Gill on lead vocals and the bassist Ruth Goller among the players. It holds a Metacritic score of 82 and placed 69th on Uncut's top 75 albums of 2023. A Rolling Stone compilation CD, Modern Brit-Jazz (2024), included his piece with Skinner, "Greek Honey Slick," alongside tracks by Zoe Rahman, Ezra Collective, Portico Quartet and Matthew Halsall.

In 2024 he took part in a "Sounds of Places" residency at The Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, and the EP Cremisan: Prologue to a Blade (October 15, 2024) comes from it. Its first two tracks were recorded at The Wonder Cabinet, with the pianist Sami El Enani on "Honeycomb," and the title piece was captured at the end of a day-long performance on June 1, 2024, organized by Radio alHara and The Wonder Cabinet, built around a call and response between his saxophone and the qanun player Laith Albandak. A pocket-size poetry collection, Looking For My Value: A Prologue to a Blade, was published alongside it. A Blade Because a Blade Is Whole followed on March 7, 2025, on International Anthem, preceded by the single "Oh My Actual Days" on January 22, 2025. He produced and arranged it himself, and the liner credits list him on voice, tenor and baritone saxophone, guitars, bass and synthesizers, alongside Conrad Singh (guitar), Donna Thompson (drums and voice), Momoko Gill (voice and drums), Rozi Plain and Ruth Goller (bass), John Ellis (piano), Hannah Miller (cello) and Macie Stewart and Mikey Kenney (violin). AllMusic gave it four stars out of five, Pitchfork 8 out of 10 and The Guardian four stars, and the critic Nick Hasted named it his album of 2025 at The Arts Desk. The 2025 tour ran through the United States (March 14 in Philadelphia to March 27 at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville), the United Kingdom (April 29 to May 10) and Europe (May 17 to May 26).

His most recent release as of November 2, 2026 is the EP Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue, issued digitally on May 5, 2026 on International Anthem. It collects instrumentals recorded in Brooklyn on an off day during the March 2025 tour, with the bassist Shahzad Ismaily and the drummer Tcheser Holmes, and a Record Store Day vinyl edition on April 18, 2026 pairs the new music with the earlier Cremisan EP. He has also hosted a monthly Worldwide FM show, Realistic Behaviour, in which musicians from different backgrounds play together live on air; episodes date from 2020, and International Anthem's artist page still lists it.

DePlume is a jazz musician by instrument, label and critical filing, and an outsider to the jazz mainstream by temperament. His tenor saxophone playing is self-taught, quiet and rich in vibrato, built on circular, hymn-like melodies and a warm tone rather than the speed or volume of the post-Coltrane tradition. The Observer's verdict was that he is not a conventional jazzer but has found a dedicated following outside the mainstream, and The Arts Desk places him at an angle to London's jazz scene, on a wavelength of his own. The other half of the work is the voice. He speaks and sings in a hushed, earnest, sometimes comic register, and the lyrics deal in self-worth, dignity, grief and collective responsibility rather than romance or storytelling. This side of the music is poetry and folk song as much as jazz, and an album such as The Corner of a Sphere sits closer to songwriting than to improvisation. Reviewers have heard spiritual jazz, skeletal dub, folk minimalism and Middle Eastern colouring in the records, and the Big Issue wrote of Japanese and Celtic folk and Ethio-jazz in To Cy & Lee.

The method matters as much as the sound. The sessions behind Gold and Come with Fierce Grace applied the Peach principle, bringing together players with little preparation and forcing them to respond to one another, which is a jazz idea about collective improvisation turned to the making of songs. He is also a community-music worker: the Cy and Lee record grew out of his job with Ordinary Lifestyles, and he describes his politics and his music as inseparable. His live shows have grown openly political, with statements about Palestine and the war in Gaza, and he has recorded with Palestinian musicians in Bethlehem. Interviewers have remarked on his disarming earnestness, and The Arts Desk described his concerts as playful and philosophical.