Jazz Articles about Karl Jenkins

About Karl Jenkins

Album Review

Soft Machine: Floating World Live

Read "Floating World Live" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
September 18, 2025

Keyboardist Mike Ratledge's “The Man Who Waved at Trains" emerges as a highlight from Soft Machine's 2025 remastered album Floating World Live, representing a crucial period in the Canterbury legends' evolution during their pivotal era with guitar great Allan Holdsworth . Moreover, Drop (MoonJune, 2025), drawn from a 1971 concert, also receives the remastered treatment for 2025. “The Man Who Waved at Trains" highlights Soft Machine at their most reflective, weaving together Ratledge and Karl Jenkins' hypnotic keyboard ...

Album Review

Soft Machine: The Dutch Lesson

Read "The Dutch Lesson" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
August 26, 2023

Soft Machine had played in Rotterdam several times before this 1973 show in the small theater De Lantaren. But this version of the band was relatively new. One of the earliest shows by the quartet of electric bassist Roy Babbington, Karl Jenkins (on multiple horns and electric piano), keyboardist Mike Ratledge and drummer John Marshall was documented on NDR Jazz Workshop--Hamburg, Germany, May 17, 1973 (Cuneiform Records, 2010). By late October the band had become a potent live force. They ...

Album Review

Graham Collier: Down Another Road @ Stockholm Jazz Days ’69

Read "Down Another Road @ Stockholm Jazz Days ’69" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
March 7, 2023

In 1969, when the composer and bassist Graham Collier took his sextet to Stockholm Jazz Days to give a live performance of their album Down Another Road (Fontana, 1969), the presence of a British band onstage at a European jazz festival was exceptional. The idea that British musicians would one day have their names on the marquee at US festivals, as Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Nubya Garcia have in the 2020s, would have been regarded as ...

Album Review

Karl Jenkins: Penumbra II

Read "Penumbra II" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
November 24, 2022

Multi-instrumentalist Sir Karl William Pamp Jenkins CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) is a successful composer of classical, film and TV music. But before he went over to the Dark Side, the then plain old Karl Jenkins was a member of the Rebel Alliance and a pivotal presence in British jazz rock. He was a founding member of the pioneering Nucleus in 1969 and a member of Soft Machine from 1972 until the early 1980s.

Album Review

Nucleus: Nucleus Live at the BBC

Read "Nucleus Live at the BBC" reviewed by Maurizio Comandini

by Maurizio Comandini
March 21, 2022

Dio salvi la regina. E la BBC. L'emittente di stato britannica ha capito fin da subito che da quelle belle energie musicali, che spuntavano come l'erba di Hyde Park sotto al tiepido sole di quelle latitudini, passavano le scelte esistenziali e culturali delle nuove generazioni e sin dagli anni sessanta ha dato ampio spazio alla musica, premiando non solo il pop ma anche le proposte più articolate e di nicchia e ha conservato in archivio una buona parte di quelle ...

Album Review

Ian Carr: Solar Session

Read "Solar Session" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
May 30, 2021

One of the first European jazz bandleaders to embrace synthesizers, bass guitars and other electric instruments, trumpeter, composer and author Ian Carr forged a singularly British style of jazz-rock with his band Nucleus, which he formed in 1969 and with which he recorded a dozen albums through the 1970s. Carr had previously paid extensive dues in acoustic jazz, most notably as co-leader with saxophonist Don Rendell of the highly regarded, culturally inclusive Rendell-Carr Quintet from 1964 to 1969.

321

Album Review

Soft Machine: Floating World Live

Read "Floating World Live" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
March 16, 2006

Fans of Soft Machine, which began with mid-1960s psychedelia but evolved into Britain's most influential jazz/rock group, generally consider the “classic lineup to be keyboardist Mike Ratledge, bassist Hugh Hopper, drummer Robert Wyatt and the recently deceased saxophonist Elton Dean. Many also suggest that ex-Nucleus woodwind multi-instrumentalist/keyboardist Karl Jenkins' recruitment signalled the beginning of the end, as the Softs moved from greater freedom towards riff-heavy fusion. But it's a more complicated story than that. The fact is that many post-Dean ...