Jazz Articles about Colin Babcock

About Colin Babcock

Album Review

Two quotes come to mind in the wake of Simon Hanes' Gargantua. The first is from Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction: “Camera got them images / Camera got them all / Nothing's shocking... “ The second, often attributed to William S. Burroughs: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Taken together, they suggest a world where boundaries dissolve and meaning becomes fluid. Hanes both affirms and challenges that premise in this sprawling, provocative work. Gargantua is written for an ...

Album Review

Simon Hanes: Gargantua

Read "Gargantua" reviewed by Vincenzo Roggero

by Vincenzo Roggero
May 25, 2026

Tre batterie, tre bassi elettrici, tre tromboni, tre corni francesi e tre voci, questo l'ensemble che mette in scena Gargantua, album proveniente dalla sempre più benemerita Pyroclastic Records. Inusuale, sorprendente, bizzarra strumentazione? Niente affatto, se in cabina di regia siede Simon Hanes, visionario artista, californiano di nascita ma residente a Brooklyn, che miscela le più disparate suggestioni musicali--siano esse polifonie rinascimentali, hard rock, noise, minimalismo, avant jazz, o colonne sonore italiane anni sessanta/settanta--con sorprendente nonchalance e altrettanto sorprendenti risultati.

Album Review

Zach Green: Chatterbox

Read "Chatterbox" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 6, 2023

On Chatterbox, young Ohio-born, New York-based composer/arranger Zach Green has written most of the music, arranged all of it, and chosen a well-modulated sextet to bring it to life. The term “young" certainly applies to Green, a graduate of Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music who also sings and plays guitar and percussion (but not here) and is yet several years shy of his thirtieth birthday--which hasn't stopped him from forming an eleven-piece ensemble, Zach Green's Elevention, or co-founding the ...