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Billy Jenkins: Ghost Music
by Roger Farbey
Ghost Music is Billy Jenkins's download-only follow-up to Death, Ritual & Resonation: Eight Improvised Studies On Low Strung Guitar (VOTP, 2015). It takes a similar tack to its predecessor inasmuch as it is entirely improvised; however the guitar is missing, replaced by piano. Jenkins last used a piano on his vinyl-only album Piano Sketches 1973-84 (Wood Wharf, 1984). The spectral sound, which pervades all of the tracks, unfolds on “Self Sleep Beds." This and the ensuing tracks “Drinkless ...
read moreBilly Jenkins With The Voice of God Collective: Scratches Of Spain
by Roger Farbey
To mark the thirtieth anniversary of its original release on vinyl (it was later released on CD) this download-only version is a welcome reissue from the canon of Billy Jenkins recordings. It's a shame that it's only available as a download since it certainly merits a physical reissue. But a digital presence is certainly better than none for this long out of print album. Jenkins is not performing live these days but perhaps he will be persuaded to make a ...
read moreBilly Jenkins: True Love Collection
by Roger Farbey
A few facts to dispense with first. True Love Collection now reissued as a download-only release, coincided with this album, originally released in 1998, being voted number 36 in BBC Music Jazz's 50 greatest jazz albums, announced in mid-November 2016 to coincide with the start of the London Jazz Festival. It's also been re- mixed and consolidated into seven discrete tracks as opposed to the 16 tracks on the original CD release. However, the order and music is identical.
read moreBilly Jenkins: Death, Ritual & Resonation: Eight Improvised Studies On Low Strung Guitar
by Roger Farbey
Having semi-retired from the music business in 2008 in favour of conducting Humanist (non-religious) funerals, Billy Jenkins returned to recording in 2014, releasing the highly acclaimed solo album Semi-Detached Suburban Home (Music For Low Strung Guitar). So its follow-up Death, Ritual & Resonation: Eight improvised studies on low strung guitar follows similar lines and compared to the considerably longer previous album is a mere extended play, weighing in at just under twenty minutes. However, as someone probably once said, quantity ...
read moreBilly Jenkins: The Semi-Detached Suburban Home (Music For Low Strung Guitar)
by Roger Farbey
For the uninitiated, Billy Jenkins stands alone, a unique guitarist in a world full of axe murderers. His back catalogue contains some of the most compelling and often challenging music to be found within the context of jazz. He might be compared to Frank Zappa for both his humour and his eclectic style but Jenkins is unquestionably a one-off, his style inimitable and his imagination seemingly boundless. For those still in any doubt about his prodigious talent, then listening to ...
read moreBilly Jenkins: I Am A Man From Lewisham
by Chris May
It's hard not to warm to a bandleader who once took a party of jazz musicians along to a motorcycle race meeting so that they could get the “risk" of improvising into perspective. That's London guitarist Billy Jenkins: an instinctive enemy of pretension and convention wherever he encounters them--a licensed celebrant of humanist funerals, chess punk, satirist, prankster and the one-time captain of a lawn bowling team, a position and a pastime widely regarded as the preserve of geriatrics. Jenkins' ...
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