Jazz Articles about Julien Wilson

About Julien Wilson

Album Review

Peggy Lee, Julien Wilson, Theo Carbo, Dylan van der Schyff: Waiting Music

Read "Waiting Music" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
June 16, 2026

Improvised music operates through a productive tension: collective intuition on one side, and the constant risk of collapse into formlessness on the other. When a group sustains that balance without resolving it into comfort, the results tend to resist easy classification. Waiting Music, the second release by the Australo-Canadian quartet Open Thread, belongs firmly in that space--an album shaped by real-time decision-making, where continuity is always provisional. Open Thread brings together cellist Peggy Lee, saxophonist Julien Wilson, guitarist Theo Carbo, and ...

Album Review

Sam Anning: Earthen

Read "Earthen" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro

by Alberto Bazzurro
September 25, 2024

Una musica largamente composta, molto intenzionale, come amiamo dire in questi casi, forse qua e là persino troppo “abbottonata," nel senso di priva delle necessarie (o quanto meno opportune, auspicabili) aperture, improvvisative ma forse prima ancora emotive, e in ogni caso di sicuro valore e interesse, è quanto ci arriva da questo nuovo lavoro del contrabbassista australiano Sam Anning, già firmatario di una dozzina di album a suo nome. Vi aleggia un descrittivismo molto educato, levigato, senza ...

Album Review

Sam Anning: Earthen

Read "Earthen" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
July 3, 2024

Sam Anning spent three years as bassist for Archie Roach, an Indigenous Australian singer-songwriter who championed the rights of that country's Aboriginal people. Roach passed away in 2022 and this album is Anning's tribute to him, a set of original works that carry forth the inner strength and understated force of Roach's music. Anning's compositions are unhurried and contemplative. They resemble classic ECM sounds but with a warmer, more intimate vibe. Throughout the album Andrea Keller's piano leads ...

Album Review

Vanessa Perica: The Eye is the First Circle

Read "The Eye is the First Circle" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
May 27, 2024

Il secondo album della compositrice e bandleader australiana Vanessa Perica, conferma le aspettative suscitate dall'impressionante debutto del 2020 Love Is a Temporary Madness che le ha portato numerosi riconoscimenti in patria e all'estero, con recensioni superlative della massime riviste specializzate. Entro le coordinate espressive del modern mainstream orchestrale, Vanessa mostra una scrittura avvincente, che alterna momenti ritmicamente trascinanti a sequenze d'ampio respiro, timbricamente ricercate. Entro smaglianti orchestrazioni ricche di trascinanti riff, lunghi pedali e scontri di sezioni, i ...

Album Review

Vanessa Perica Orchestra: The Eye is the First Circle

Read "The Eye is the First Circle" reviewed by Barry O'Sullivan

by Barry O'Sullivan
December 1, 2023

The music on The Eye is the First Circle is undeniably outstandingly composed and arranged by Vanessa Perica. Her second outing--following Love is A Temporary Madness (Self released, 2020)--with another supersonic ensemble, it was superbly recorded at the Sing Sing East Studios in Melbourne, showcasing numerous flawlessly performed solos by some of Australia's best improvising musicians. The bandleader, composer and arranger has created explosively expressionistic charts which would bring out the best in any orchestra. Perica utilises the chosen voices ...

Album Review

Vanessa Perica Orchestra: The Eye is the First Circle

Read "The Eye is the First Circle" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 25, 2023

In a review of Love Is a Temporary Madness, the debut recording by Australian composer/arranger Vanessa Perica, the observation was made that “Perica's impact in the realm of big-band jazz should be anything but temporary." Perica's second album, The Eye Is the First Circle, has added an exclamation point to that assertion. Again, each of the album's seven numbers was written and arranged by Perica. And again, she has shown that she deserves to be in the ...

Album Review

Barry Deister: Hemispheres

Read "Hemispheres" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 20, 2023

Tenor saxophonist Barry Deister labels his sextet on Hemispheres a Collective, and for good reason--two of the musicians on Deister's fourth album are from the U.S., the others from Melbourne, Australia. Although the way they managed to work that magic isn't spelled out in the album's notes, the group performs seamlessly on seven of Deister's original compositions, which would seem to indicate that everyone was in the same studio in Preston, Australia, when the session was recorded in February 2023. ...