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Album Review

Julie Sassoon: Inside Colours Live

Read "Inside Colours Live" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic


Shedding warm illuminations on all our fragile, secretive, sensuous moments, is the underlying axiom behind British pianist/composer Julie Sassoon 's vulnerable and telling music. A classicist at heart who, whether she is aware of it or not, comes at her music in much the manner as Marilyn Crispell--visceral, personal, labyrinthine, yet ultimately accessible--Sassoon's sense of the improbable and the possible doesn't so much dominate the live performances that comprise Inside Colours Live as they green-light both to occur simultaneously.

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Album Review

Julie Sassoon Quartet: Voyages

Read "Voyages" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic


As on a high speed, downhill slalom chase, listeners are suddenly, nakedly and without poles hurled into “Missed Calls"; the opening burst of sublime energy and groupthink cracks Voyages wide open, sets the mad, determined pace and tone for a craftily organic, six-song, free-jazz adventure which never lets up. It is breakneck rhythm churning, keening, into whiplash waves, a wake up call of massive proportions. “Missed Calls" busts Berlin-based, British pianist Julie Sassoon and her henchmen from isolation and double ...

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Album Review

Julie Sassoon Quartet: Voyages

Read "Voyages" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


Not all voyages involve smooth sailing. Indeed, pianist Julie Sassoon's Voyages opens on a blustery note. It is a quartet outing--as opposed to Sassoon's 2021 solo set, When You Can't go Outside...Go Inside (Jazzwerkstatt), with the pianist joined by reedman Lothar Ohlmeier, bassist Meirad Kneer and drummer Rudi Fischerlehner. The opener, “Missed Calls," sounds like a prelude to battening down the hatches in its blustery beginning section, before Sassoon take an introverted solo during a lull in the squall.

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Album Review

Ab Baars, Meinard Kneer, Bill Elgart: thrīe thrēo drī

Read "thrīe thrēo drī" reviewed by Mark Corroto


The trio of Ab Baars, Meinard Kneer, and Bill Elgart obliges listeners to reflect on how they listen to freely improvised music, not in a concert setting where the listeners' attention is in effect captured, but the act of listening to a performance from recorded format. A fellow critic eschews records, saying that the experience is spurious and lacks the vitality of an in-person attestation. Does his philosophy cut off his nose (or ears) to spite his face? Proof of ...

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Album Review

Julie Sassoon: If You Can't Go Outside...Go Inside

Read "If You Can't Go Outside...Go Inside" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic


As we've learned time and time again throughout this sick year, 2021, not many humans are ready to completely surrender themselves for the good of their fellow kind. So it's truly a beautiful thing when Berlin based pianist Julie Sassoon surrenders so completely to her instrument and the moment that, like a medium, reveals mysteries to us in ways both intimate and oceanic. When woman and piano meet, If You Can't Go Outside. . .Go Inide may, for ...

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Album Review

Julie Sassoon: If You Can't Go Outside...Go Inside

Read "If You Can't Go Outside...Go Inside" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


American novelist and short story writer Stephen King has said that he thinks his stories are “found things, like fossils in the ground...relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world." He goes on to say that, as a writer, it is his job to reveal as much of this fossil as he can. Interesting, and maybe true. If it is, that can be transferred to music. Sounds as found things, not in the ground but in the air, waiting to be ...

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Album Review

Ruf Der Heimat: Secrets

Read "Secrets" reviewed by John Sharpe


Originally an outfit exploring perspectives on free jazz from either side of the Berlin Wall, Ruf Der Heimat continues to thrive on Secrets, only its fourth release over the near three decades since its 1992 birth. Leader and reedman Thomas Borgmann remains at the helm beside his longtime accomplice drummer Willi Kellers but, in the meantime, the former East German contingent of saxophonist Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky and bassist Christoph Winckel has departed to be replaced in the current incarnation by ...

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Album Review

Julie Sassoon, Willi Kellers: Waves

Read "Waves" reviewed by John Eyles


Although pianist Julie Sassoon's first recording—the trio Azilut!'s To the Power of Three (Babel)—was released in 2001, the intervening years have not seen a stream of albums from her; in fact, her releases to date can be counted on two hands. However, in Sassoon's case quantity is far less important than the variety and quality of the music on the releases. In particular, amongst her recordings are two fine solo albums—New Life (Babel, 2006), inspired by the 2004 birth of ...

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Album Review

Urs Leimgruber, Jacques Demierre, Barre Phillips, Thomas Lehn: Willisau

Read "Willisau" reviewed by John Eyles


The LDP trio (shorthand for Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber, Swiss pianist Jacques Demierre and American-born bassist Barre Phillips) first came together when they recorded Wing Vane (Les Disques Victo, 2001) which was followed-up with LDP—Cologne (Psi, 2005), an early use of the trio's abbreviated name. Subsequent LDP releases have come every three or four years, all on the Jazzwerkstatt label, with Willisau being the fourth of them, but the first to feature a guest player alongside the core trio. LDP's ...

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Extended Analysis

Naima/Live in Berlin

Read "Naima/Live in Berlin" reviewed by Duncan Heining


Saxophonist Alan Skidmore has worked in many, many different settings during a career that stretches back to the early sixties with Alexis Korner--one of the three 'Fathers of British Blues" (paternity disputed!). That career has included recordings with John Mayall and Eric Clapton, Georgie Fame, Sonny Boy Williamson, Stan Tracey, Mike Westbrook, Mike Gibbs, the Walker Brothers, Van Morrison, Colin Towns, John Surman, Harry Beckett, George Gruntz, Norma Winstone and Kate Bush. It's an astonishing track record by any standards. ...


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