Jazz Articles about Chris McGregor

Chris McGregor: In His Good Time

by Chris May
July 30, 2012

Founder of South African group the Blue Notes and, later in London, the Brotherhood of Breath, pianist Chris McGregor (born in the Transkei to Scottish missionary parents) was among the first musicians to take what became known as “township jazz" beyond South Africa, when he and the Blue Notes went into voluntary exile in 1964. Like pianist Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim) and trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who had both left the country in the wake of 1960's Sharpeville massacre, McGregor ...

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 ...

Blue Notes: The Ogun Collection

by AAJ Italy Staff
February 15, 2009

In principio fu il Sud Africa; e la fuga dall'apartheid di cinque musicisti neri e un pianista bianco. Era il 1964 e nel paese dei diamanti le prospettive per un sestetto jazz a ranghi misti [si chiamavano Blue Notes] non erano certo incoraggianti. Da qui la decisione di approfittare dell'invito del festival di Juan-Les-Pins, arrivato grazie ai buoni uffici di Abdullah Ibrahim, per lasciare l'inospitale terra natia e stabilirsi nel vecchio continente: prima in Svizzera, tra Ginevra e Zurigo, poi ...

Chris McGregor: Very Urgent, Up to Earth & Eclipse at Dawn

by Andrey Henkin
September 7, 2008

Chris McGregor Group Very Urgent Fledg'ling 2008 Chris McGregor Septet Up to Earth Fledg'ling 2008 Brotherhood of Breath Eclipse at Dawn Cuneiform 2007

It reasonably could be argued that without the arrival of pianist Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes, British jazz would ...

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood Of Breath: Eclipse At Dawn

by Nic Jones
August 10, 2008

This one only goes to show how easy review writing can sometimes be. Imagine a band that on the occasion captured for posterity here consisted of eleven pieces caught on a night when they were in sparkling form. That doesn't do it justice. Arguably as much a political statement by dint of its very being as much as it was a musical aggregation, South African pianist McGregor's Anglo-South African band always specialized in music that was vibrantly and urgently alive. ...

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 ...

Chris McGregor: Eclipse at Dawn and Very Urgent

by Clifford Allen
June 1, 2008

In the spoken introduction to the latest archival recording from pianist Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, emcee Ronnie Scott quips that “South Africa is a wonderful place...to come from." The audience at the 1971 Berlin Jazztage responds with uneasy laughter at Scott's thinly-veiled politics, then cheers as Dudu Pukwana tartly comments with his horn.

Improvised musics, and especially jazz, are itinerant musics borne out of difficult social and political situations, and the audacity of a racially-mixed ...