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Jazz Articles about Alan Skidmore
Naima/Live in Berlin
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. ...
Continue ReadingAlan Skidmore: After The Rain
by Duncan Heining
In 1998, with After The Rain British saxophonist Alan Skidmore got to achieve a lifetime ambition to record this beautiful 'jazz with strings' album. Out of print for some time, its reissue is well overdue. It was once a cliché in the jazz world amongst critics that records such as this represented a descent into the depths of middle-brow hell. The one exception, they would allow was Stan Getz' Focus with Eddie Sauter's gorgeously Bartokian string arrangements. Like most critical ...
Continue ReadingMike Westbrook Concert Band: Marching Song Volumes 1 & 2 Plus Bonus Tracks
by Roger Farbey
It's hardly surprising that Mike Westbrook reigned supreme in the latter quarter of the 1960s and early 70s. His big band was voted top of that category in the late-lamented Melody Maker British jazz polls for 1970 (and the two years either side of that). In the same year, his third album, Marching Song, recorded a year earlier came third in the category “LP Of The Year" (the number one album that year was John McLaughlin's seminal Extrapolation so there ...
Continue ReadingThe Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore: The Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore
by Bruce Lindsay
According to Philip Larkin, poet and jazz fan, sexual intercourse began in 1963 “Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban and the Beatles' first LP." Many other commentators suggest that the British jazz scene died at about the same time, steamrollered out of the way by the emerging behemoth that was the British Beat Boom. It didn't die. As The Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore proves, players like Alan Skidmore and his fellow tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott had plenty ...
Continue ReadingAlan Skidmore: Impressions of John Coltrane
by AAJ Italy Staff
Resto generalmente freddo verso i tributi ai grandi jazzmen del passato ma per questo doppio album di Alan Skidmore dedicato a John Coltrane confesso d'essermi entusiasmato, e in qualche momento commosso. Forse non esiste, dopo Parker, sassofonista tanto riprodotto quanto Coltrane e gruppo tanto “consumato" quanto il suo classico quartetto con McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison ed Elvin Jones. Alan Skidmore, che non ha mai fatto mistero della sua passione per Coltrane, ci offre in questi brani (ripresi in un concerto ...
Continue ReadingAlan Skidmore - Mike Osborne - John Surman: SOS
by AAJ Italy Staff
Il trio formato dai sassofonisti britannici Alan Skidmore, Mike Osborne e John Surman rimase in vita un paio d'anni, tra il 1973 e il 1975 incidendo quest'unico album (nel febbraio 1975) che prese il titolo dalle iniziali dei tre cognomi, appunto S O S. Finalmente, dopo una lunghissima assenza dal mercato discografico quell'incisione viene ristampata in compact per la gioia degli appassionati che non l'hanno conosciuta e di quelli che hanno consumato il vinile per i continui ascolti. SOS è ...
Continue ReadingAlan Skidmore / Mike Osbourne / John Surman: SOS
by John Eyles
It is wonderful to have this album available for the first time on CD--and scary to realise that it was recorded and released in 1975! It is worth dwelling for a moment on how the (jazz) world has changed in the intervening years. In 1975, the idea of an all-saxophone group was unheard of; the countless legions of saxophone quartets, now two-a-penny, all lay in the future.
It was noteworthy, and commented on by reviewers at the time, that SOS ...
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