Jazz Articles

John Warren & The Brass Project: The Traveller's Tale

by Roger Farbey
March 17, 2017

The John Warren /John Surman collaboration The Brass Project(ECM 1478) recorded in 1992, was a belated follow-up to their previous 1971 collaboration Tales Of The Alonquin on Decca's Deram label. As John Kelman's 2005 review of the Vocalion reissue of Tales of the Alonquin avers, this was, in Kelman's words, a “seminal recording." This archival release of the brass-heavy British ensemble appears on the burgeoning Fledg'ling label (ostensibly a folk label but increasingly reissuing rare British jazz) and ...

John Surman: Morning Glory

by Roger Farbey
June 8, 2016

This is the first John Surman-authorised reissue of his seminal album released on the Island Records label in 1973 (ILPS9237) that acted as a signal delineation between what preceded it (a relatively conventional approach with an emphasis on blistering baritone saxophone outings) and what was to follow (the far more pastoral ECM years, albeit with the occasional quartet and big band foray). Up to this point British jazz has been stoking-up a real furnace of excellent and often ground breaking ...

John Surman: Westering Home

by Roger Farbey
June 7, 2016

Originally released on Chris Blackwell's Island Records, John Surman's first solo album was a complete departure from his previous works. It presaged the canon of pastoral solo recordings he was to produce later for ECM in contrast to his more robust and conventionally orchestrated recordings. His second and final album for Island, Morning Glory, a year later, was a reversion to the dynamic manifestations to which Surman had been hitherto associated. In subsequent ECM and other recordings Surman ...

Chris McGregor: Our Prayer

by Stuart Broomer
November 6, 2009

Chris McGregor (1936-1990) is best known as the pianist/leader of the Brotherhood of Breath and its small band antecedent the Blue Notes, the group that he formed in South Africa in 1963. The inter-racial band elected for a voluntary European exile from their homeland and its policies that would ban their very right to assemble. In the heady '60s, their blend of bop and Township rhythms rapidly melded with free jazz, creating one of the most dynamic musical mixes of ...

Chris McGregor: Up To Earth

by Clifford Allen
July 20, 2008

This archival release of South African pianist-composer Chris McGregor's music was recorded in 1969, ostensibly as a follow-up to the Blue Notes' Very Urgent (Polydor, 1968), also reissued by Fledg'ling. It serves as somewhat of a missing link between the Euro-African free jazz of their debut and the township and kwela-inflected big band looseness of the Brotherhood of Breath, whose first proper recording was still a year away.

For whatever reason, this session went unissued, though ...