Jazz Articles about Barbacana

About Barbacana

Album Review

This Anglo-French quartet dishes out a profusion of surprises on each track. Youthful vigor and ingenuity are staples for these musicians who generate a multidimensional platform, with inferences from progressive rock, jazz-rock and avant-garde-like adventurism. The album represents another young band presented by UK-based Babel Records that teeters on the leading-edge of what could be considered a nouveau jazz-framed outlook, where artists expand previously established limits. They blastoff with “Animation," a piece that could ring in a new ...

Album Review

Barbacana: Barbacana

Read "Barbacana" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
August 2, 2013

Barbacana is a UK-based group of interest on a number of levels. Chief among them is the presence of the very busy and talented keyboardist Kit Downes. Along with his namesake progressive jazz trio, Downes has worked in the prestigious company of European greats Django Bates and Julian Arguelles, as well as with American alto legend Lee Konitz. His compositions account for about half of the material on this self-titled debut and demonstrate his multi-genre influences. That said, Barbacana is ...