Jazz Articles about Larry Stabbins

About Larry Stabbins

Album Review

After a long hiatus, reedman Larry Stabbins' renewed presence on the British scene offers cause for celebration. All the more so as Sarost, one of his prime contemporary outlets, matches him with partners of equal standing. Flanking him in a co-operative trio--whose name, derived from the first two letters of their constituent surnames, affirms the group's egalitarian ethos--reside drummer Mark Sanders and bassist Paul Rogers. Four studio cuts unfold a spacious dialogue built on sensitive listening and instrumental virtuosity, whether ...

Album Review

Larry Stabbins & Mark Sanders: Cup & Ring

Read "Cup & Ring" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
July 28, 2025

Inspired by the 5000 year old Neolithic rock carvings pictured on the sleeve, Cup & Ring opens and closes with brooding, ritualistic pieces in which Larry Stabbins' breathy flute drifts like mist over Mark Sanders' deliberate, processional percussion. These atmospheric bookends, along with similarly spare interludes throughout, frame a set grounded more deeply in the language of free jazz--a realm both musicians know intimately. Stabbins, returning to performance after a lengthy hiatus, brings a layered backstory to this ...

Album Review

Tony Oxley: Unreleased 1974 - 2016

Read "Unreleased 1974 - 2016" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
September 12, 2024

The British drummer and bandleader Tony Oxley passed in 2023, aged 85, after a career which began in the mid 1960s as the drummer in the house band at Ronnie Scott's club. From this prestigious but relatively codified platform, Oxley soon steered into less travelled waters. In 1969 he was in the quartet which recorded John McLaughlin's debut album, Extrapolation (Polydor). In the early 1970s, he began adding ring modulators, tone generators and other fx tools to his assemblage of ...

Album Review

Tony Oxley Quintet: Angular Apron

Read "Angular Apron" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
September 1, 2024

Among the most welcome jazz events of 2024 is the return to active duty of the great British saxophonist Larry Stabbins following an absence of over a decade. Stabbins went into voluntary exile in 2013, after around thirty-five years at the deep end of British jazz. Disenchanted with the culturally regressive direction in which the music and its ecology seemed to be heading, he even went so far as selling his tenor. But things change, and towards the end of ...

Album Review

137: Strangeness Oscillation

Read "Strangeness Oscillation" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
July 17, 2024

More comebacks than Sinatra? Well, not really, given that this is the first one, but the return of the beyond-category British saxophonist and flautist Larry Stabbins after an eleven-year absence is headline news. In 2013, Stabbins (a.k.a. Stonephace) very publicly announced that he was beyond disgusted with the music business in general and the jazz business in particular and that he was leaving London and returning to the West Country where he was born and bred. We would be hearing ...

Album Review

"Stonephace" Stabbins: Transcendental

Read "Transcendental" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
September 29, 2012

On his thirteenth birthday Larry “Stonephace" Stabbins, already a promising saxophonist, bought John Coltrane's Africa/Brass (Impulse!, 1961). The impact was immediate and long-lasting, as Stabbins writes in the liner notes to Transcendental. By the early'70s he was an established player on the UK jazz scene. Forty years on, the sound of Africa/Brass still influences Stabbins and while he makes no attempt to mimic Coltrane's sound, there is something of Coltrane's spirituality underpinning much of the music on this excellent recording.