Articles by Colin Buttimer

Bugge Wesseltoft and Matthew Herbert: Two Approaches To Leadership

by Colin Buttimer
May 12, 2004

It was a game of two halves, Jim, and the name of the game was power... Either the advertising for the concert was ambiguous or I had unconsciously indulged in a little wishful thinking. I’d thought that Bugge would be playing with Matthew Herbert, perhaps firing up some electronics to create a two-pronged attack upon Herbert’s big band. I was mistaken however: Bugge was to play the first half, Matthew the second and there would be no jolly ...

The Treecreepers at the Red Rose

by Colin Buttimer
January 30, 2004

The Treecreepers are a shifting unit of improvisers centred around the core duo of Pete Flood and Ian R. Watson. We enter the hall at the back of the Red Rose Club’s bar to find the sextet beginning to assemble on a stage bathed in dim red light. That light together with a lack of windows creates a feeling of out of timeness to the music that follows. From Ashley Wales’ trestle table emanate a variety of sonics, ...

Adam Butler: Schmoozing With The Apr

by Colin Buttimer
December 12, 2003

The first sounds on Adam Butler's solo record Schmoozing are those of a crowd, probably the “après garde" of the title, which is subjected to an alien sawing sound, as though said crowd were being sawn through. A single note is played forcefully on a piano as if in annoyance at the chattering that surrounds it. The piano fills the sonic foreground. More notes twinkling into the upper registers are interrupted by distorted echoes. Down again and then welling upwards. ...

Arve Henriksen and Terje Isungset: Two Friends In Nature

by Colin Buttimer
December 7, 2003

Arve Henriksen, dark haired, almost boyish, appears on the darkened stage and seats himself on a stool lit by a single pool of light. He picks up his trumpet and proceeds to demarcate space and delineate feeling by the force and dissipation of his breath. Henriksen understands the nature of his instrument as a mechanism to catch and channel the wind into music. Tonight he diverts into the auditorium everything from the gentlest of breaths barely able to ...

Bobby McFerrin: Live at the Royal Festival Hall

by Colin Buttimer
November 24, 2003

Royal Festival Hall London, UK 16 November 2003

One man alone with his voice (no band, no instruments) in a large classical venue is not an entirely promising prospect. Bobby McFerrin’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall, however, was one of those rare experiences whose memory is likely to be savoured long afterward by its audience. Bobby was dressed down: workboots, jeans, black ‘t’, but his music wore many costumes and hinted at an ...

Soft Machine: BBC Radio / 1971-1974

by Colin Buttimer
November 15, 2003

Soft Machine is one of a select number of musical entities to have adopted names from William S. Burroughs’ writings; others include Steely Dan and DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. To do so in some way implies a radical agenda, an outsider view of things. Soft Machine was certainly never mainstream in its approach to jazz, exploring as it did a fusion with rock and other musics. This release brings together all four of the group’s BBC radio sessions from ...

Bugge Wesseltoft: New Conception of Jazz Live

by Colin Buttimer
November 9, 2003

Reflective electric piano chords, the tsk tsk of percussion – it could almost be the the first half of a '70s buildup to a souljazz masterpiece – there’s a little electric bass, the occasional unidentifiable sound and then suddenly the marshal pulse of an electronic house rhythm sounds out accompanied by the low growl of an electric bass. Instead of resolving immediately, the music sounds like the players are feeling their way abetted by the ebb and flow of DJ ...

DJ Wally: Nothing Stays The Same

by Colin Buttimer
November 4, 2003

Thirsty Ear has consciously positioned itself at a median point between popular groove-based musics and exploratory jazz. On this release DJ Wally has at his disposal music played by some of the cream of free jazz players, including Matthew Shipp, David S. Ware and William Parker. Nothing Stays The Same is composed of a number of medium length pieces, four or five minutes long, interspersed with shorter pieces, the briefest of which spans a mere 23 seconds.

Peter ...

Children On The Corner: Rebirth

by Colin Buttimer
November 2, 2003

Miles Davis’s first electric period traced an arc from 1969 to 1975 which continues to inform the most exploratory electric jazz of the past three decades. Miles developed techniques (generic cross-pollination and studio cut and paste, to name only two) which produced seriously funky and out music and which have inspired a whole slew of innovators including – to take fellow trumpeters as one example – Jon Hassell, Cuong Vu, Dave Douglas, Erik Truffaz and Rob Mazurek. Miles Davis’s legacy ...

Rubyana: Amazing Grace/Rubyana/Epistrophy

by Colin Buttimer
August 25, 2003

These three discs share the same players: Rubyana on flute, Al MacDowell on bass, Sharaye White on vocals, Frank Marino on drums, Yusef Ali on conga drums, and Eddie Boubay on timbales. I must confess when I read the makeup of the group I suspected the music might be somewhat one- dimensional, but for the most part I was wrong. Amazing Grace contains five versions of the tune. The music is of course a spiritual, but strangely ...